


This Was The Side On Which He Fell From Heaven

by Fallswithgrace



Series: Formas Corpora (We Changed Each Other) [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Art, Cannibalism, Dark Will Graham, Firenze | Florence, Gradual becomings, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Hannibal changes Will, Hannibal meets Will when he is 26 and Il Mostro, Love/Hate, M/M, Metamorphosis, Murder Husbands, The Fall as an allegory for a painful and inevitable love, Violence, Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter, Will changes Hannibal, Will meets Hannibal when he is 18 and studying abroad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:46:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 51,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22728619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallswithgrace/pseuds/Fallswithgrace
Summary: In an attempt to escape the darkness constantly hailing his mind, eighteen-year-old Will Graham finds himself studying abroad in Florence, Italy.Looking at the paintings of dead Italian masters seems safe enough.At least before Will meets a young doctor-in-training by the name of Hannibal Lecter.A story about if Will and Hannibal had met as young men almost twenty years before their initial encounter in Quantico and how that would vitally change them but still retain the transgressions and longing at the heart of their relationship.Also prequel to Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru (Do No Evil).  Not strictly necessary to read one before the other, though Mizaru does include some spoilers.
Relationships: Will Graham & Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Series: Formas Corpora (We Changed Each Other) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1497866
Comments: 94
Kudos: 517





	1. Florence/Uffizi

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm very happy to finally share this story!
> 
> For the most part this story follows canon with one vital alteration-- 
> 
> What if, instead of meeting in Quantico, Hannibal and Will met as young men in Florence Italy while Will was a student and Hannibal just began his illustrious career as Il Mostro? 
> 
> Those who have read my sequel know where this whirlwind romance, full of cannibalism, word play, and Dante allusions ultimately goes, but I hope you enjoy seeing the start of Will and Hannibal's relationship!
> 
> A disclaimer: what's portrayed here is by no means a healthy relationship. It is instead one fraught with darkness, change, volatility, and the need for someone despite all the risks they pose. 
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

_I. Florence._ Will.

At their most polite, people accuse Will Graham of being "overly imaginative". Maybe even "a riddle", if they feel like rubbing elbows or trying to flirt, an attempt doomed forever at its onset. At their worst, Will becomes "insane". However, not even Will, with his powers of a boundless mind, envisioned being so far away from Louisiana or the major rivers that ran like arteries through the States. 

Will grew up on those waterways and on his father's boats. They taught him everything there was to know: the vast and the sun-soaked, and the lush and the dark. They taught him that every town and school was identically different: a medley of mania and ennui, good and bad, the wounded and the hurting. 

His college is also in New Orleans, but the campus bears little resemblance to the landscapes of his childhood and adolescence. The lawns and architecture are modern and tidy. When Will first arrived, they hadn’t struck him as picturesque, though. Their pristine pageantry came off as sterilized, like an asylum, and it still does. Half a year in, he continues to go from building to building in more than his usual estranged haziness.

That’s part of why he’s here, of all places. Thousands of miles from home— 

In Italy. 

Florence, to be exact. His classics professor won’t let him forget it.

Truth be told, Will has no business being here. He’s not even a classics major, something his professor bemoans whenever Will’s within earshot. While he sees no possibility of converting, he’s beginning to think that his dual studies in psychology and sociology, with a focus in criminology, aren’t doing him any favors. At least not in the conventional sense. He’s good in the fields. But that doesn’t lessen the throbbing between his eyes that builds up every time he wades the shallows in the minds of others, his line cast in oil-black waters.

“Fishing,” his father had advised him, once upon a time, “doesn’t mean you reel everything in. Sometimes, you catch something, and you let it go.” 

Will’s father is a man of stubborn silences and sparing, practical words. For him to have resorted to metaphor meant whatever he’d sensed in his son, and the feelings it evoked in him, he’d rather not name or touch. 

Try as Will might, though, his mind isn’t always a fine instrument like a rod and lure. Most days it’s incapable of releasing what he’s snared. No; mostly, his mind is the stream. Each thought, dusky and disturbed and his own and not his own, drifts beneath in his subconscious. Shadows, probing the surface of deceptively still waters. 

_That’s_ why Will’s in Florence. 

He’d grabbed at scholarships and grants, and his professor, almost faint with relief, was more than happy to help with airfare and costs for accommodations. 

“ _Scusi, scusi_!” a shrill voice cries, and Will is violently jostled. _Great_ , forced bodily contact— Will’s favorite. It’s right up there with people persistently trying to meet his eyes, even when he is obviously avoiding it. 

The person shoving Will aside appears to be a tourist. His Italian is accented awfully. While he’s dressed in an expensive jacket and slacks, his roll-away luggage is battered, cheap, partially unzipped. Will reads a desperation to impress. The man wears his desires to stand out, however, as unremarkably as their ill-fitting suit. Probably an academic, Will decides, one with some recognition in the field but obviously vying for more— the way he continues to force himself through the crowd suggests disregard for those who do not suit his devices. A lack of self-awareness. He doesn’t realize his bullheadedness does little to raise his colleagues’ low estimation of him— those with whom he tries to curry favor refute him, repulsed—

No. This isn’t what Will’s here for. 

He’s here to lose himself, but not in the average cruelty, selfishness, envy, or petty deceit.

Or at least, if he has to face those things… he’d rather it be immersed in Italy’s most prized works of art. 

That’s why he’s standing under Italy’s too blue sky, surrounded by its noisy locals and tourists and making his way inside the Uffizi gallery. 

_II. Uffizi._ Hannibal.

Melpomene and Thalia, the respective muses of tragedy and comedy in Greek theatre, are better recognized by their masks than their classical epithets. The two masks often appear together. Wails twist Melpomene’s features into a visage of agony. Laughter contorts Thalia’s in hysteria. Those with even some fleeting and indirect awareness of the dramatic arts of Ancient Greece will recognize the muses’ masks, arresting in their display of terrible affect, but they will not fathom the meaning behind them. 

Civility, it strikes Hannibal, is much the opposite. People think they understand the concept. Man comes into the world pure, and his nature is noble, if he can defend his goodness against temptation. His spirit is beautiful because it is incorruptible: that is the narrative of civilization so many sheep maintain. Yet they fail to grasp the truth of civility. Its harmony does not signify an inherent, deep quality to man. No; it is a mask, beautifully warped and riveted, that sits atop humanity’s errant nature. 

This is hardly the first time Hannibal has thought so, but the thought pleasantly resurfaces here in the Galleria degli Uffizi. 

The young doctor sits on a bench across from a work by Botticelli. He crosses his legs and rests a thick notebook on his knee. A fine point of graphite kisses his paper. Scratch by restrained scratch, minute marks build into a range of values, molding the supple flesh of a nymph, the strong shoulders of the god Mercury. 

Hannibal can hear appreciative murmurs as museum-goers glance at his drawing and then look the artist up and down in equally profound consideration. 

Yes, Hannibal thinks with a barely-there smile— the sheer mask of civility is so clear to him here in the gallery. Here, men and women of sophistication vicariously enjoy rape and murder and bacchanals presented fastidiously on ochre walls. Here, so-called patrons of the arts try to shore up their nature as beings of progress and upstanding. Here, never is it so clear that their attempts to distance themselves from the Ancient Western sensibilities of the flesh only intimate the weaknesses and instincts of their own _undermined_ corporeality.

With a gentle uplift of his pencil, Hannibal attempts to suggest the god Zephyrus’ breath on his terrified lover. He lifts the darkness of his mark, achieving a shade of gray semi-translucence.

Hannibal is reflecting on his sketch when he catches a pungent artificial odor. A young man stands beside him, all his attention on Botticelli’s work. Committed to his drawing, and aware that his patience will be rewarded with the source of the offending aftershave losing interest and going away, Hannibal resolves not to move. Instead, he intends to dedicate this _rude_ interloper to memory.

What he sees, however, and what sees him back, makes him pause.


	2. Primavera/Metamorphoses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All!
> 
> We finally get to the fateful, Florentine meeting between Will and Hannibal.
> 
> Disclaimer: my Italian is very basic, and my French practically non-existent beyond interesting art references I've read, so I apologize for any language errors and will correct as needed! Also, there is an outdated and offensive use of the word 'queer', corresponding to the early 1990's time-frame of this series. No offense is intended toward LGBTQIA readers. 
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

_III. Primavera/Spring._ Will. 

Will shouldn’t have come here.

Not that it’s the first thought entering Will’s mind. It occurs to him jointly alongside: fuck, so he’s not even safe from paintings anymore?

There’s something about this painting, though. At first glance, it’s tame, tranquil. Idyllic, even. Gods and goddesses frolic in a wooded grove. Bitter oranges punctuate the dense foliage, and dainty flowers carpet the ground, softening the landing for bare female feet. Watching the scene, Will experiences a sense of rapture and unease akin to glimpsing a snake slithering through the grass. 

_Aw,_ _hell_.

The verdant and lilac hues, lush and slick, are charged with an elemental force that exudes Will’s madness from behind the soft shells of his retinas _._ The warped, shallow space within the frame simultaneously absorbs and repulses him. It’s not a true location, a possible place— it’s the dark underside of one. 

Struggling to regain control over his breathing, Will briefly considers that, yep, this probably isn’t what art-lovers mean when they speak of being arrested by a painting. 

Then, the colors bleed onto the walls. 

Having had enough experience dealing with not-quite-hallucinations, Will plots an escape-route to the nearest restroom. That’s when the ground tilts. It buckles beneath him like over-saturated canvas, and the next moment, he’s going to fall— 

Until a hand catches him. It grips Will’s shoulder firmly— lifts his entire body weight, actually, given how Will’s feet drape bonelessly against the floor. He’s not sure if he feels grateful, though. 

The force pinning him against the air, like a specimen, is careful, but also bruising, excessive, maybe even… punishing?

But that makes no sense. 

_“Mi scusi, signore. Si sente poco bene?”_

The voice is deep and flawlessly accented. It’s as calming and demure as the hand is hard and foreboding. 

Will jerks sharply to tear himself away. He might not succeed at freeing himself, but he does produce the undesired effect of making the room rock, again, on a more precipitous angle. It’s like Will’s back on a boat, the cold marble rising up against his sightline like the tide.

 _“Sto bene,”_ Will hisses, trying to get his bearings against the vertigo, his rapid heart-beat, the pulsing thing beneath his skin. 

_“Sei sicuro_ — _?”_

_“Si, si!”_

Oh. Forgot the polite _grazi_. 

Will doesn’t care.

When he finally works up the necessary coordination in his legs to brush past, Will finds he still can’t move, locked in place by that _damned hand_. 

If there was any instance when Will would especially avoid eye contact, it’s now, reeling from a semi-hallucinatory episode with a freaking painting in a room full of aesthete-wannabes and spectacle-seeking tourists. Despite this stranger’s smooth tones, Will can easily imagine the expression he’d find, the things he’d _see_ , were Will to look into his face: the patronization of a beleaguered good Samaritan, for example, or the disdain of an interfering prick who’s realizing he’s gotten in over his head but won’t suffer the blow to his ego by backing off. 

Both expressions are ones Will’s long grown tired of being on the receiving side of. 

So Will decides not to risk eye contact, but he still needs to glare at something. The aggravating, interloping limb works. A Bulgari watch immediately catches Will’s eye. The luxury timepiece shines against the hem of a cashmere and wool suit. The cufflink that glints against the expensive fabric is sterling silver, polished to an almost blinding brilliance. A well-groomed asshole _. Perfect_. Just what Will needs. 

But not a weak one, apparently, though that’s less obvious than the deliberate guise of respectability. The fingers enwrapping Will are long, deceptively slim, with nails clean in the fashion a man of class would keep. But there’s also something else. Purposeful energy. Unabashed strength. A primal nature vibrating beneath the surface calm. Will feels it in the warm, heavy palm against him, crowned by broad knuckles and a tracery of veins rippling under bronzed skin. He’s only ever seen hands like this on the pages of master Renaissance artists: well-formed, evocative, and radiating with sheer, unmatched physicality.

Will drops his gaze back to his feet as he feels himself flush with a different nature of fever.

Goddamn— _stop. Thinking._

“I take it you are a student of art?” 

Will blinks. At some point, without his conscious awareness, the stranger somehow coaxed him onto the bench so that they now sit together. Will stares at the man’s lap and fails to disregard how the thigh muscles strain against the man’s trousers. They currently sit a mere inch or so apart.

The stranger’s also talking to Will in English. He must have recognized the less than stellar Italian and correctly placed the source, foreclosing another path out of this interaction. 

“Or perhaps you are an admirer of Botticelli’s work?” the man continues. His English, unlike his Italian, is lilting and obviously non-native. Will can’t discern if that’s the reason for his overly formal language, or is it another part of the man’s meticulous self-construction? Will’s half-tempted to lift his head, to observe how the words play across the man’s lips and see. He fights down the irrational impulse. 

Instead, his gaze follows ( _necessarily, this time_ ) the man’s hands as they unzip and search his bag— leather, also expensive; well-used but still in excellent condition— while the man idly chatters on, totally indifferent to his companion’s lack of response.

“It is only that the average viewer may profess appreciation, but rarely are they as affected as yourself.” The man fills the lid of his thermos with water and offers it to Will. “It has not been drunk from,” he explains when Will refuses to budge. 

“Overtired,” Will says in a tight, low voice, “isn’t the same as affected.”

The word is one on Will’s extensive vocabulary blacklist. He’s not sure which ranks highest for earning his hatred, though: his poor “affected” mind, or his “addled, afflicted, queer, unsound, insane” one. 

Nor has he decided if he hates being called that more than being subjected to some stranger’s prying.

Not that the man seems to sense Will’s ire, or he’s very studiously ignoring it. 

Will realizes why. “You’re a doctor.” He almost laughs.

What are the chances? His luck is just terrible today. 

“Why do you say that?” 

The man’s tone and cadence up to this point had been straightforward, emptied of emotional depth for social levity. Now, Will hears a change. It’s slight and shadowy, but enough to disturb the deceivingly calm veneer of this person’s demeanor, hinting at the form of an intention while continuing to veil it in darkness. And if there’s anything Will’s used to, it’s his empathy dragging other people’s thoughts to light no matter how overwhelmingly and undesirably. 

The lack of access startles him now, even more than the painting. Before he can stop himself, he finally looks up at the stranger’s face. And, suddenly, Will’s transported—

Away from Florence and paintings and students and professors and crowds of locals and tourists— 

And he’s filled with the sublime terror of standing on a cliff.

Blood pounds against his ears, as if Will’s hearing the waves crashing down below. 

The stranger doesn’t appear to sense Will’s disquiet. His gaze, like his hand and every other aspect of his manner, is persistent, holding Will. The dark of the man’s eye color, which Will had a second ago pinned as brown, is now, he realizes, maroon. Huh— strange. Will doesn’t look into people’s eyes often, so maybe he shouldn’t be as struck by the hue as he is. 

A red this intense, Will thinks, would turn black under the moonlight. 

“It’s… the way you act,” Will says, breathless and gesturing vaguely. He feels a little dazed, recovering from some impact whose nature he still can’t discern. _Get it together._

“I am a doctor,” the stranger admits. Will knew it: the complete composure, the inane but undeterred chatter, and the efficient motions with not one wasted _had_ to be a physician. A competent one, too, or at least pretty egotistical. Will’s medical experiences are limited to the latter. “Though I have yet to complete my education.” Will’s also not surprised there. The man looks young: mid-to-late-twenties, maybe. “I begin my residency after my holiday. That being said, I would be remiss in my duties if I did not offer my advice where medically relevant.”

At that point, Will realizes the man’s hand hasn’t wavered, still offering the drink. Slowly, Will takes it. He tosses the contents down his throat. The shock of cool liquid almost sends his head throbbing anew, but after a moment, some of the fevered heat blessedly recedes.

“Thanks,” Will mumbles sincerely. He needed that, so much he barely resists the urge to press the cold metal against his cheek. 

The man smiles as if reading Will’s thoughts. 

_Smug bastard_. Two can play at that game. “Based on your last non-medical opinion,” says Will, “I take it you’re also an admirer of Botticelli. Even if you aren’t studying art.”

A thick notebook and an assembly of art supplies sit at the other side of the stranger— like the satchel, they demonstrate a practical application of funds beyond simply creating a façade of a person of culture. The materials are sturdy, high-quality, with evidence of frequent, careful use. Remembering what the doctor said about not having drunk directly from his half-full thermos, Will assumes the liquid has been used to dilute paint and ink. Darkness bleeds through the edge of the notebook.

“Occasionally I am compelled to try and touch greatness,” confirms the doctor as the slightest suggestion of a smile cuts his face.

Everything about him feels sharp. As if a blade had been taken to any softness and carved away the form of a man. Even bent over his notebook he maintains the strong line of his back, his shoulders squared and vast. The glare of the Uffizi gallery makes his eyes appear as pooling shadow beneath the defined ridge of his brow. The amused smile on his face brings his cheekbones into stark relief, pointed and proud like a skull. 

Will finds him handsome and haunting all at once. 

Maybe that’s why, instead of leaving, like his every instinct and a history of social situations demands, Will makes chit-chat. _Will Graham,_ voluntarily having a conversation. 

And here he’d hoped being in Florence would make him feel more sane. 

“If you’re going to copy a master work, _The Birth of Venus_ is better known,” says Will, ignoring his other thoughts. “ _Primavera_ is…more difficult to read. More ambiguous, though probably about as scandalous.”

“So your studies are of the classical persuasion,” the man says.

Will shrugs. He is here for his classics course, and to avoid thinking about his true occupation.

“I find myself drawn to _Primavera_ as of late,” says the doctor. “While both paintings feature transformation, _Nascita di Venere_ only shows the results rather than the act itself.” 

He lifts a long finger to gesture to the right of the painting. As the edge of his sleeve rises, Will observes the muscles in his wrist, the strength of his arm.

The man’s medical training appears not to be sedentary at all. 

“Here,” the man says, “Zephyrus, god of the west wind, claims the nymph Chloris. How striking it is to place Chloris, as she appears before Zephyrus’ designs, beside Flora, the incarnation of Chloris after Zephyrus. At first she appears frightened, preyed upon. Altered, she gazes back as a goddess. A smile is on her lips, as if she knows something mortals cannot.” 

“‘My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies’,” says Will. 

The doctor blinks. Then, he recites, _“’In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora’._ ” 

Of course he knows Latin, too. 

“The opening line of _Metamorphoses_ ,” says Will in rejoinder. “Ovid.”

Joy lights Will’s companion’s eyes, and he reminds himself that he doesn’t deeply relish it. He firmly denies that it makes him imagine ways to impress and excite _more_. 

Will rarely gets this kind of reaction out of people. Sure, they’ll momentarily admire his mind, before they become quickly disturbed by the less conventional routes it takes and the personal invasions it’s capable of. 

For whatever reasons, this doctor appears to enjoy Will’s company. Even after seeing him being, well, Will: curt and ill and unmoored by his hyper-sensitized empathy. And the doctor’s not the only one exhibiting the strange symptoms of some foreign ailment. Will feels him provoking a number of unknown and stirring reactions in Will himself, not all unpleasant, not by far. 

And that’s not good.

“Some metamorphoses are best avoided,” Will tells himself as much as his companion. “In _Primavera_ , for instance. Zephyrus, known as the gentlest of the winds, acts in a manner that could be argued is loving and violent.”

“So often divine transformation is both,” the doctor argues. “And yet, who can deny the artistry, the power, that changes a mere nymph into a goddess of creation?”

“Spoken like a true doctor and artist,” Will chuckles lightly. Wait, was he just…

Flirting? 

_The hell is wrong with him?_

To Will’s horror and anticipation, the other man seems eager to reciprocate. Lips still curled around a smile, he smoothly speaks: “’As she talks, her lips breathe spring roses: I was Chloris, who am now called Flora.’” Yup, definitely flirting. Will wishes it wasn’t working. If only the man would stop with the easy citations and allusions. It’s activating a kink Will didn’t even know he had, hardwired in some advanced and yet very primordial part of his neurochemistry. “Tell me; does that not strike you as the picture of loveliness?” 

“If only the reality were the same way.”

“That is the reality of many of the Uffizi’s onlookers.” 

“I guess their realities don’t account for the Graces being on stand-by the entire time Chloris is raped, lost in their own cultish fanaticism,” Will argues, brandishing a loose fist at the trio of dancing demi-goddesses. “They seem innocent at first, until you realize their gazes are luminous, false. They only reflect each other, and the other only reflects themselves. A violently self-absorbed and all-consuming love.” 

“And then, there’s Venus” —Will redirects his gaze and admonishments— “the so-called goddess of love. She observes the attack remotely, enshrined at the center of this taboo wilderness. Cupid, her vain offspring, prepares his shot, reminding us that the romance of man isn’t occult or even pagan. It’s far lower. Pure, animalistic nature.” Will almost feels the point of Cupid’s arrow like it’s pricking the back of his neck. “And then, there’s the god Mercury. He goes for his piece of fruit, as if once he snaps it from the branch, the whole scene will come crashing down.” 

The scene plays out like one of Will’s mental reconstructions: the assault is the afterimage of an already completed sequence events that have left a body irrevocably altered. But this also feels different from when Will has analyzed crime scenes for his classes. After the initial rush of insights and associations that outstripped his learned values, recollections of common decency would kick in, like recoil after a gunshot. Will would be left shaken, sick with horror.

Now, though, he’s breathless, and confused, and completely exhilarated. Maybe it’s the high of oxygen deprivation. Will wouldn’t know; he never speaks so much with anyone. But it feels good, so good, it’s like—

He can’t stop.

A flustered glance over Will’s shoulder at the other man reveals something delighted, almost hungry in his countenance. 

Yeah, Will thinks, heart pounding. _That_ feeling. _That_ high.

“Here we are, trading mythological insights,” says the man, “and I still haven’t introduced myself. My name is Hannibal Lecter.”

Hannibal— or is it Doctor Lecter? — raises his hand to Will. It’s a gesture Will is accustomed to meeting with apprehension, and while his body tenses, he clasps the other man firmly like his father taught him.

“Will. Will Graham.” 

“Will,” Hannibal says, slowly, like he’s trying out the words on his tongue. His hand leaves Will’s with the same exploratory ease. The tips of his fingers skim light, deliberate paths all the way down Will’s palm to the inside of his wrist. His hands bear the marks of his trade, calloused despite their upper class grooming. Equal parts friction and soothing. The sensation lingers in the creases of Will’s lifelines and against the subtle protrusions of his pulse even when contact ceases and distance returns between Will and Hannibal’s flesh. 

Will absolutely _does not_ feel a frisson of excitement or want. 

“Have you ever supposed, Will, that the reason no one attempts to save Chloris is because she doesn’t need to be saved?” 

Will quirks his brow. “The evidence seems to suggest otherwise.”

“That’s if you believe Chloris needs saving from herself, because Zephyrus and Chloris are one and the same. See Flora in the painting? Her hair is remarkably short for the time period, cut in a masculine fashion. And still, she is the epitome of life, fertility, and femininity. Perhaps Flora is an amalgam of Zephyrus and Chloris. Lovers once at odds and now united. She cannot be saved from Zephyrus, because she doesn’t need to be saved from herself.”

“What _does_ she need, then?”

“To become everything she can possibly be.”

“That would almost sound romantic if it didn’t entail becoming both hunter _and_ hunted.” 

“An example of a very conventional romance for the ancient Greeks and Romans.”

Will huffs with laughter, and Hannibal smiles back at him. 

“Just enough moral folly to earn the modern interpreter’s contempt.” Will sighs. “Not that their myths are supposed to tell you how to live.”

“Why look at them at all, then?”

“Well… to tell you how you live. Human nature. In all its _violence_ ,” Will speaks dryly, almost flippantly, as if to undercut the way his utterances summon the _things_ always lurking in the back of his skull, “and its _love_.”

While Will’s gaze is on the painting, he’s only half-looking at the work of art. Shadowy tendrils that he thought he’d suppressed creep through the pathways in his brain, leaving darkening caresses in his thoughts. Figures. He can cross the sea, become lost in a foreign tongue, and still he cannot hide from his mind, and the empathy that leads it to reflect the most unsavory aspects of others. Of himself. 

_IV. Metamorphoses/Metamorfosi_. Hannibal.

How serendipitous, Hannibal thinks. Atrocious aftershave and rudeness notwithstanding, he finds himself enraptured by the young man sitting abreast of him. 

Will’s eyes are now resting on the _Primavera_ , though Hannibal can sense that he is not truly looking at it. He knows what it is like to be _seen_ by Will. 

First, an experience of color: the blue in Will’s eyes is complex, layered. The range of hues reflect both the fragmented light of the water’s surface and the murkiness of its depths. 

Second, and most unsettling, is an experience of being cut into: it is so singular to Hannibal that he struggles to describe it in any other way than physical. The moment Will saw him was that, powerfully physical and intellectual and emotional— it was almost complete exposure. Will’s mind reached inside his own. In that short moment it had taken an impression of the cavernous dark of Hannibal’s being, even as it missed the specifics of what his darkness had done. Would do. 

While Hannibal feels a familiar response to such keen attention, he also finds himself, contrarily and most unusually, desiring to elicit _more_ of Will’s fixation. What would it be like, he wonders, having Will absorb himself as completely with Hannibal’s masterpieces as the young man had with the _Primavera_? 

Under the terrible cologne, Hannibal had picked up the outpouring of Will’s sweat as his nervous system responded automatically to a potent stimulus Will alone could sense. Hannibal could not see it, nor it appeared did the rest of the Uffizi’s patrons. Hannibal was intrigued, watching the young man become visibly unbalanced in the thrall of Boticelli’s painting. That, and Hannibal’s other intentions drew him ever more resolutely toward Will’s way. 

Will’s unruliness and obvious disdain for Hannibal’s presence certainly galvanized the doctor’s resolve to treat Will with special attention, though the young man’s frantic pulse, clammy skin, and body tremulous with violent, hallucinatory aftershocks also struck Hannibal as very curious. When Hannibal had experienced such intense energy coursing through human flesh before, it had been as a doctor or in his other, more artistic capacities. 

What in the painting could the young man have seen to leave him so aroused? 

Hannibal had not predicted such a diverting turn of events. Nor did he expect Will’s insights afterwards. 

Extraordinary. 

So clever and unique and unfettered by moralistic blindness and infirmity. Will’s distress and then his dark, delightful acumen appealed to Hannibal with an air so delectable they completely eradicated the stench of bad aftershave. The urge struck Hannibal like a hunger pang. He craved inspiring the same responses in Will through his own feats of art and mortality. How rewarding would it be to have Will _see,_ in all the ways Will could see? It was near staggering how deeply Hannibal wanted to know.

Like that, Hannibal knew Will Graham is dangerous. And it is plain to him right now, as it was before, that Will is also very beautiful. 

Hannibal’s fingers itch with the desire to draw him. Will’s curls would be luxuriant in soft graphite. His pronounced cheek bones would be bold marks that slope into the jaw set with amusing stubbornness in his otherwise delicate face. 

With the lightest of strokes, Hannibal would attempt to convey every haunted hollow of Will’s mien— the shadows ringing his wide eyes, the sunken sides of his mouth. Will’s lips would give the doctor pause. Another apparently soft attribute, but pursed somewhere between a grin and a condemnation. 

Alas, Hannibal almost sighs. Drawing a stranger without their permission is discourteous. He will have to contend with Botticelli. And _that_ is an entirely different sympathy for Hannibal. Settling for an Italian master. 

Will is remarkable for provoking such novel responses in Hannibal, if nothing else. 

Hannibal returns to his drawing, and at some point Will seems to remember himself. Suddenly remembers himself, if the way he jerks toward Hannibal is any indication. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…!” Will fumbles, tucking his teeth into his lower lip. 

“Not at all,” Hannibal says honestly, and then not so honestly, “art is intended to be appreciated.” He knows Will would rather simply appreciate the painting. The deviant twists and turns in Will’s mind fascinate Hannibal enough to permit this unceremonious oversight. 

Little does Will realize, it’s also his saving grace that Hannibal’s cognizant the younger man wasn’t simply bored by their chat.

Will almost smiles. Hannibal suspects it doesn’t come easily to him. 

The effort looks very pleasing. Will’s handsome features are even more exquisite when twisted with pleasure and pain. 

“At least I’m not interrupting your appreciation,” Will says, watching Hannibal draw. 

Hannibal could laugh. If only he knew. 

“‘Touching greatness,’” Will recalls Hannibal saying. His eyes are electric as they trace the exact movements of Hannibal’s pencil. He briefly scans the rest of the page, and then his eyes fall closed. Hannibal can see frantic movement beneath his lids, however, as if Will is recreating the execution of the drawing in his mind. _Interesting_. “You weren’t kidding,” Will says in a somewhat awed voice as the veil over his sight slowly lifts. 

Then Will’s eyes fall lower, drawn to the metallic glint of the scalpel almost concealed entirely beneath a charcoal-stained rag. 

“And in unconventional ways,” Will adds, his expression shuffling quickly through recognition, bewilderment, curiosity, and then… consideration. 

How keen. 

Hannibal is still not resolved over what he plans to do with Will. 

Or perhaps, most pressingly, what he wants to do.

“I have found the scalpel finer than any other blade,” says Hannibal. “And is greatness not unconventional?”

The doctor proceeds to lift his scalpel under Will’s careful scrutiny. The blade sweeps through the air like a conductor’s silver wand. It effortlessly carves a peel of wood, demanding only three of Hannibal’s strikes to refine the graphite to its sharpest point. 

“I can’t imagine other doctors using a scalpel with such artistry,” says Will. His begrudging admiration, low and soft, is music to Hannibal’s ears. “Or to such artistic ends.”

How Hannibal wishes he could demonstrate this to be true. 

“It’s kind of you to say so,” Hannibal replies, reining his impulses in. “I will take credit for possessing a sharp eye and practiced hand. _Le dessin_ is mine; _la conception_ , however, is the work of others.”

“You’re not Italian.” 

“Perhaps I can also speak French.” Hannibal smiles. 

Will does not. The same shrewd aspect overtakes him as it had when he’d visually retraced Hannibal’s drawing: he’s _analyzing_.

“Your Italian is fluent, and possibly your second language, but it’s not your native tongue. And you’re not French, though you’ve probably lived in France for some time. Northern European, maybe.”

 _Clever boy_. “I was born in Lithuania. Paris is where I went to boarding school as a boy and completed much of my training to be a doctor. While I remain fond of France, I have yet to enjoy a place as much as I enjoy Florence.” 

“That’s not surprising. You’re a man of the arts, in every meaning.” Will raises an eyebrow. “Wordsmithing being one of them.”

Hannibal tries not to smile too broadly— just as it’s best not to show all of one’s hand, so one ought not reveal all of one’s teeth. Will seems to take that as encouragement. That, or he finds it difficult to turn off his analysis so abruptly. The younger man continues, “ _Dessin,_ drawing _,_ and _conception_ , idea, share a common meaning between them: design. How the word presents in French depends on context.”

Will is grinning now; Hannibal tries to burn it into his memory even as his entire body is thrilling. 

“‘My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies’,” Hannibal reads Will’s thoughts. The grin cuts deeper across the younger man’s face. “Do you mean to compare my artwork to Chloris’ change from nymph to goddess, Will? If so, I am flattered.”

“Your work is a different caliber of change.”

“Oh?”

Will nods. “Things don’t happen to you. _You_ happen. Your art is Zephyrus’ wind— the catalyst by which the average becomes the sacred.”

Rarely is Hannibal’s control so tested. 

He takes a moment to compose himself, adding a petal into Flora’s many blossoms. Hannibal feels Will’s eyes roving over the muscles in his hands, cataloguing every flex and twinge, before moving down to the point of his pencil. He follows Hannibal’s rendering, stroke by stroke, pause and press, with concentration. 

It feels just as remarkable as Hannibal thought it would. 

“I am as liable to change as any man,” Hannibal says. The words are, strictly speaking, true. He can tell by Will’s face that the other man reads Hannibal’s resistance to them. Yes, there is no changing Hannibal’s nature— his life’s joys and challenges have only ever been obstacles or paths back to it— but he is… _amenable_ to expanding upon it. “I suppose it would take the right inspiration.”

Hannibal wonders what Will makes of his statement. “And you, Will? What would you change for?”

Will’s eyebrows knit together in consideration. “I think I’ve changed a lot already. I didn’t think I’d find Florence all that interesting.”

Like any good wordsmith, Hannibal notices his tense. “And now?” 

Will’s eyes hover just below meeting the maroon of Hannibal’s. The grin is less prominent, but the ghost of it still haunts the corners of his lips. “Now…? I _just_ might be broadening my mind.”

The doctor considers his approach.

It’s not difficult to see that Will is cautious. Throughout their conversation, he’s said much about Hannibal, art, and society but has volunteered almost no personal information. Likewise, Hannibal has not offered his own analyses of Will, even though they course through his mind. He’s certain it would not have a positive effect on their encounter.

Will lacks, however, the requisite experience to have developed mental fortresses tall enough to repel Hannibal. Perhaps, were he an older man, more frayed by the world and its monsters, Will would have shut the other out after the brief resonance he’d had with Hannibal’s psyche. 

This Will, though, even with his reticence, seems eager to engage with Hannibal. He’s a young man. One, by all appearances, who’s been denied a partner for his clever mind. Will is hungry. And Will is oh so clever. 

Perhaps if Hannibal were an older man, too, he would play the long game. He’d maintain a friendly if clinical distance, enjoying the brilliant depravity that is Will’s while never endangering himself. Maybe, his person suit would be drawn so tightly around Hannibal that he would be unable to recognize his desires. 

Now, however, he feels them keenly. 

He wants to know the beautiful, twisted trespasses of Will’s mind. He wants to know his sharp tongue and dry laughter. 

He wants to know what it’s like to press his mouth into the hollow of Will’s pale neck and run his teeth against the quiver of the other’s pulse. He wants to taste his blood and his violence and his pleasure. 

He wants Will Graham. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, hope this chapter made it clear that this series will be very Florence art, culture, and food-centric, haha!
> 
> Thank you all for reading and sharing your thoughts!


	3. La Dessin/La Conception/Sorbetto

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All!
> 
> My apologies for the lateness of this update (chapters usually come out weekly). To make up for it, I've included two new chapters!! 
> 
> Chapter 3 (or Parts V and VI) fleshes out more of Hannibal and Will's backgrounds with major attempts to stay true to show canon. Will's background alludes a little to the smallest bits of insight gleaned from Harris' Red Dragon novel, too. Hope it feels honest to his character (his teenage, somewhat more brash and vindictive character!). The deaths surrounding Hannibal's family are rooted primarily in Bryan Fuller's vision, and so remain somewhat vague, arcane.
> 
> Again, apologies for any language errors and will correct as needed.
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

_V. Le Dessin/La Conception_. Will.

This is fun.

Will’s having fun during a study abroad trip, talking to a stranger. 

Who knew?

It’s different than what he feels playing with the mutts down by the docks, which is the closest he’s gotten to unmitigated joy and comfort. He’s not lighthearted, per say. But his more unappetizing impulses have quieted to a murmur in his mind, almost soothing, if socially reprehensible thoughts could resemble a babbling stream. 

In Will’s version of fun, apparently, they do just that. They’re unavoidable, but they feed ever so naturally into his words as he expounds on epic artifice and manipulation with Hannibal Lecter. Mercurial delight flashes through Will as he picks up on the clues of Hannibal’s double-speech and peels the layers of his accented words back for Hannibal to see. It’s a skewed empathy that enables him to enjoy Hannibal’s recreation of Chloris’ abduction, but one that he can’t help think applies to all art lovers in the Uffizi’s halls.

Will would be the first to admit that he’s probably losing his mind. 

The look on Hannibal’s face, however, makes Will want to believe that maybe he isn’t losing it. At least not any more than he usually is. Maybe, just maybe, he’s not the only one enjoying their conversation.

That’s what he’s thinking, at least until Hannibal checks his wrist-watch. _And_ — just like that— Will’s guard is up again. 

The dark things are no longer sumptuous but demanding.

Then Hannibal says, “I don’t suppose you’d like to join me for lunch?”

Will blinks. 

With deft fingers, Hannibal slips a sheet of something fine— rice paper, Will realizes— on top of his drawing before closing his notebook around it. He arranges the darkly-bound object in a parcel with his other supplies. With the softest of noises, buckles clasp the doctor’s bag securely shut. Hannibal’s face finds Will’s.

His eyes are auburn-bright, glinting mischievously. 

No, Will’s not the only one having fun. 

And that realization sends heat throughout his entire body. 

Will does not do dates. He has experienced sloppy kisses and bodies pressed against each other. To call these experiences intimate would be generous and misleading. Grabbing, sucking, clawing, Will remembers every joining as some gross approximation of an animal union. His brittle friendships could not withstand the force and impersonality of these couplings. So, Will’s romantic relationships are non-existent, his fulfilling sexual entanglements few and far between. 

When Hannibal speaks next, Will doesn’t see his face, determined not to make eye contact. He absolutely does not want to witness Hannibal catching him blush. “It’s difficult for non-locals to find restaurants that actually represent the best of an area’s cuisine. I consider myself something of a food connoisseur and have striven to do just that. I’m happy to say that I have not found all of Florence’s finest, but I’ve come upon a few gems.”

Hannibal stands, and Will observes his long legs covered in inky fabric. “I’d like to thank you for our compelling diversion—” Will’s eyes flick to the flash of Hannibal’s smile, evenly balanced as a hook “— and to continue it.”

When Will is positive that his body is no longer burning up, he stands, too. Something like pleasure crosses Hannibal’s face. Something traitorously like hope fills Will’s chest. 

That, and the terror of being on a bluff sensing the plunge beneath his feet. 

Will’s pretty sure this isn’t what people are referring to when they speak of taking a “leap of faith”. 

Nevertheless...

“My student budget is tight with Euros,” Will warns. 

“How do you feel about ‘hole-in-the-wall’ eating?” Hannibal asks, and Will almost collapses with relief.

“Sounds like my kind of joint.”

Upon exiting the gallery, Will tries to ignore the _Primavera_ and its irrational, residual pull on him. 

He feels something magnetic in the painting’s wake, like the tide cycling flotsam on and off the shore, or the undercurrent of self-annihilatory desire that would compel one to take a backward glance into Hades and have love’s ghost draw them more deeply into its depths.

Or like the feeling of a hand firm and guiding on one’s shoulder. 

Outside the Uffizi, conditions are perfect for Florence’s locals and non-locals and non-ideal for Will. The sky is cloudless blue, the atmosphere gently warming. 

Will represses a shudder.

His professor might compose incessant odes to the city’s _divina bellezza_ — sunlight polishing the waters of the Arno to resplendent jade, buildings bright at dawn like citrus groves— but for Will, all that means are additional eyes from which to avert his gaze and a torrent of words in tongues foreign and familiar that get to him regardless.

Public marble nudes and pretentious architecture be damned; Will’s never been an admirer of conventional beauty, anyway.

He wades through the crowded city center, head down. Other’s thoughts still hover at the peripheries of his mind with the buzz of gadflies. Will could almost regret agreeing to whatever the hell _this_ is.

But he also finds himself unable to stop casting glances at Hannibal, only a foot or so ahead of him, utterly at home and somehow separate from the urban sprawl. The doctor manages to carry himself on the edge of authority and inconspicuousness through whatever chaos. He’s never impeded by a passing body. He appears to discern their rhythms with a blend of musical and clinical sensibility, slipping in and out from sidewalks and shadows. When it’s advantageous and only then does he call attention to his presence, not the way other men of Hannibal’s social and physical statures would throw theirs around. He smiles politely as he sidesteps a photographer (who, noticing Hannibal, becomes flustered and turns scarlet). He surpasses police officers on their bicycles. They nod in his direction with vague disinterest before peddling awkwardly across the uneven path, proceeding with their lives.

“You know Florence well,” says Will, because Hannibal, ever observant, notices Will’s looks.

When Hannibal turns, Will realizes he’s closer than he intended to get. Their faces are a breath apart, Will right against Hannibal’s elbow.

“I intend to,” answers the doctor, amiably. “Inside and out.” 

Will notices the extent of Hannibal’s attentions to _him_ when they take a detour beneath a gate into a narrow alleyway. It’s empty in comparison to the main streets.

Will gives Hannibal a look, projecting incredulity and gratitude. Hannibal looks back, feigning innocence.

“I see what you mean.”

Determining the width or length of the route is a challenge. It transforms constantly with the shadowy interplay of early-spring foliage and the agitation of a passing body, a murmur of wind. 

Will attributes the desertedness of their surroundings to the sharp incline of the land. From the other side of the river, the angle of the cobblestones would inevitably carry him down, down, down. As it is, there’s a twinge in his calves and a respiring strain low in his gut from the steep ascent.

Hannibal strides forward without visible exertion, but Will keeps pace, also with relative ease. A lifetime of manual labor and a propensity toward hands-on activities like fishing have fortified him, where other non-physical hardships have weathered him, worn his defenses thin.

It feels good: invigorating. 

Will works his legs past the initial discomfort of disuse to limberness, strength. The cords of his muscles surge warmly beneath his skin. He tugs at the collar of his shirt, releasing a button. Stretching, he arches the heat forming under his jaw, right at the intimate isosceles of his neck, toward the cool of the shade, relishing it. It’s full like the underside of a broad hand. 

Hannibal’s eyes follow Will all the way to the height of the slope. 

“Guess this is one way to work up an appetite,” says Will. He’s not panting, but still…

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” says Hannibal.

Where the panorama of the city from his hostel window always felt as claustrophobic as a post-stamp, the skyline now right up against the blockade of Florence’s old buildings is dynamic: twisting and slanted and obscured and alive.

Hannibal looks at Will like he knows.

The breeze on his skin is more acute than ever. “…Yeah.” 

“Costa San Giorgio may not be one of Florence’s more famous destinations, but it has its charms.” Hannibal indicates a house up the road. 

Though the façade is more decorated than its neighbors, Will sees nothing impressive about the stout structure and its severe frescoes, the umber paint eroding to expose plaster bleached as bone.

“One of Galileo’s residences,” Hannibal explains. “Though not the site of his imprisonment and death.” 

“Doesn’t look like much.”

“An unassuming shelter for a mind of remarkable insight,” remarks Hannibal fondly. “Insight mistaken for madness. Once scorned and then celebrated.”

Will touches the building— cold, dry, beautifully lifeless— and scoffs. “The usual quandary of insight versus hindsight,” he says. “One’s natural, the other a freak occurrence. The only difference being a matter of distance.”

Hannibal stands behind Will, Will slotted into the line of the doctor’s body. The other man reaches out, and his fingers make contact with the wall next to where Will’s hand rests. 

He caresses the cracks, outlining the fissures, always moving with thoughtful appreciation. 

“Is that not critical?” Hannibal asks, breath against Will’s ear. “The matter of distance?”

Will carries off the verbal part of his retort, but not the physical one. He’s unable to shrug, unwilling to move, though whether into or away from the body surrounding him he doesn’t know. “It’s the critical difference between some things. Tragedy. History. A man who sees things no one else wants to recognize and is persecuted for it in one lifetime, understood in the next.”

This, Will thinks, is exactly the point at which he’d usually scare people off. Not Hannibal, though. He nods, his throat a faint brush against the back of Will’s neck. Will feels dizziness pool, thick and iridescent as honey, low in his skull. And yet he’s hyper-aware, especially to the hairs standing at the base of his scalp. 

Will doesn’t think he’s ever known anyone like Hannibal.

He never expected anything like this in Florence.

“The difference between the past and the future, then,” says Hannibal lightly, “may be the moment when one comes to see what was grotesque as beautiful.”

Will laughs. His body gently collides against Hannibal’s. “Madness becomes reason. Acts of violence become works of art. I don’t recall that prerequisite on the brochures.” 

“As I said, discovering charm sometimes necessitates looking close to see what others cannot. I myself have always sought..." Hannibal smiles and gradually removes himself, "unorthodox sources of inspiration.” 

The place they finally arrive at is modest, tucked away in a corner joint. Hannibal is apparently full of surprises. He speaks with the proprietress before a younger woman, younger than Will, leads them to a small table beneath a striped umbrella. 

When their food arrives, the mood has shifted. Will and Hannibal’s interactions before had been something of a joust. They’d engaged in mental parrying, evaluating the force of the other’s insights. Every reference, analysis, double-entendre, sought to determine how much ground the other would lose before reclaiming it. 

Now, half under the shade and half basking in Florence’s sun, cod briny and smooth in his mouth, Will believes they are enjoying the other’s presence in a more primal way. 

Hannibal tears apart a loaf of bread. The crust cracks open and exhales steam visibly into the air. Hannibal and Will’s fingers brush as Will takes a piece. As he bites into the soft, yeasty warmth, he finds Hannibal’s eyes are on his mouth. The other man’s gaze follows the flicker of Will’s tongue as it cleans a crumb from the corner of his lips. 

Hannibal eats more politely. His knife raised just so, he cuts his meat into pieces. Juice doesn’t run down his chin; he is thorough and controlled, even as he obviously enjoys what he’s consuming. Now that Hannibal has removed his jacket, Will can see the way his throat moves to swallow.

Will stops him from ordering them both glasses of wine. Will’s never been a big wine drinker, no matter how much Hannibal insists it pairs with the fish. Eventually, Hannibal concedes. Or, at least he does _somewhat_. When his glass arrives, Hannibal swirls the wine and deeply inhales its scent. Smiling, he says something about the year of the wine, something Will does not comprehend. 

Somehow, Will ends up letting Hannibal hold the glass beneath his chin and coaxing the younger man into breathing in the sparkling liquid. The fragrance is sharp and mellow all at once. Will doesn’t end up taking a sip, but Hannibal looks like he’s won. Will doesn’t feel bad when he rolls his eyes.

The food is better than anything Will has ever tasted. When Will pops a handful of green grapes into his mouth, the tartness of the berries mingles with the salt of olives and seafood still prickling his tongue.

Will hasn’t any of Hannibal’s refinement. He sucks away the juice of the fruit from his skin, chews the last of the bread heartily, and is sinfully vocal in his enjoyment of all the textures and flavors of their shared meal. 

Going by Hannibal’s smile, the other doesn’t mind one bit.

“Could I tempt you with some dessert?” Hannibal asks when the waitress takes away their empty plates.

Will runs his napkin between his fingers. “A little early in the day, don’t you think?” Will is surprised when his watch reads four, almost five in the afternoon. He didn’t realize how long they’d been eating and talking.

“A good sorbetto is never too early.”

“You really are a food connoisseur, aren’t you?” 

“One must enjoy the finer things in life,” Hannibal says. “I often prepare my own meals, which I enjoy greatly. Still, this is a special occasion.”

Will chooses not to respond to that last sentence. “Of course you cook,” Will concludes wryly, but he’s not surprised. Hannibal is a doctor, smart, handsome, and capable, apparently in more than a couple of ways. Nothing will be denied to a man like this. 

Will, on the other hand— “You’ll have to treat me,” he says. His wallet is much lighter now, even if it was money well spent.

“Of course, dear Will.”

_Dear Will._

Even without dessert, those words already sweeten their late lunch. Will feels giddy with them, and hopes he’s not enjoying himself too much.

_VI. Sorbetto/To drink._ Hannibal.

If engaging in intellectual banter with Will has tested Hannibal’s restraint, it’s nothing compared to watching him eat. 

There are no words to describe what good food means to Hannibal. Each descriptor in every language is too much and not enough. So, he simply relishes it, whether that’s in the craft or consumption. Likewise, Hannibal has no words for people who don’t appreciate good food. 

Only actions. 

Will is a man starved for intellectual company _and_ for a well-cooked and nourishing meal. His table manners are appalling, and Hannibal can only imagine what he’d do with food that wasn’t primarily hands-on. His enthusiasm, however, makes Hannibal overlook that (if only for a moment). 

Hannibal couldn’t help but watch Will delight in the warmth and tenderness of the bread, chewing it so thoroughly Hannibal envisions the flour having melted away on his tongue. He stripped grapes from their vines and licked the moisture from his palms. Something like recognition flickered in his eyes as he ate his fish whole and also something like wonder. The wonder rose as a beautifully clear note from the back of his throat.

Hannibal discovered, for a man so cerebral, Will is immensely physical as well. He is attuned to all his senses, and his body can’t help but respond to the stimuli. 

That knowledge is making Hannibal’s control a _far_ more precarious thing. 

“Wow.” Will blinks as they enter a gilt-and-marble shop. 

Since Will has allowed Hannibal to treat him to dessert, he’s decided to hold nothing back. Will seems to have figured out Hannibal’s trick, and he looks both mortified and recriminating.

“Palate cleansers are as important as the main course,” says Hannibal. “To freshen the stomach and stimulate the appetites to properly receive what remains.”

“Out with the old, in with the new,” says Will skeptically. “The metamorphoses of ingestion.”

“Escoffier advised that sorbetto be eaten between courses, before the roast.”

Will scrutinizes the décor. “I’m not sure marble floors really affect the taste.”

Hannibal smiles. “Trust me.”

Will raises an eyebrow. Both nearly disappear into his fringe when he arrives at an equally marble-covered counter. 

Hannibal has always enjoyed this shop. The high quality of the sorbetto, derived almost entirely from fresh, natural ingredients, is evident in the sharp odors that underlie the chilled fragrance of freezer frost and in the subtle but variegated color palette. The range of wine darks, faint pinks, muted purples, and pale yellows that tint the luxurious sweets bears a strong resemblance to the organs, fluids and tissue layers that deliciously embellish the human body. 

“Hannibal,” Will says sternly. “This is too much.”

“It’s only a single scoop.”

It appears wordplay will only get Hannibal so far with Will. Will averts his eyes resolutely from the finely-crushed pulp and flesh and ice, though Hannibal senses Will’s temptation. The allure is there, glimmering, sweet, tart, and enticing. And yet Will denies it.

“One ought to embrace new experiences,” says Hannibal, trying a more direct entreaty. “You have done so by being in Florence. Let this experience be all it can be.” Well, he can’t be blamed for some double-meanings— language, like taste, is a multiply nuanced thing, after all.

Will’s eyes are hard. “I can’t.”

“If you are worried about costs, I am not averse to sharing. Though it’s not my usual practice.”

Will glares at anything that isn’t Hannibal. 

Given his money, his reputation, and his charisma, Hannibal is more used to blind, and obsequious, obedience. Will follows him one moment, resists him the next. Hannibal finds the young man both vexing and endearing. 

Such a contradictory thing.

Hannibal senses that an almost imperceptible display of dominance will not earn him Will’s favor. So, he opts for a look of contrition. 

This seems to ease Will’s hostility. It does not beget his agreement, however. Will’s wringing his hands unhappily, and he looks around the establishment. He gravitates to the outdoor eating section, which is empty.

Hannibal follows him and thinks he may have to accept defeat.

Will pauses, observing the marble tile that continues even beyond the shop’s interior. “To call me a dirt-poor student wouldn’t be far from the truth,” he says. “I practically grew up on microwaved meals and canned vegetables. Was helping my dad make ends meet on a boat as far back as I remember. We’d catch fish or hunt for ourselves, a lot.” Will shuffles. “Poor kids to single, blue-collar fathers in Louisiana don’t really get things like this.”

What Hannibal had read as a nervous tick turns out, he realizes, to be Will deliberately scuffing his boot. The bottom of his foot incises a dark mark into the polished ground. Observing the gash, Will’s shuttered expression parts to expose satisfaction, swift and cruel like lightning—then, it lapses into circumspection once more.

But not before having revealed a part of Will to Hannibal that the other man suspects he never shares. People may know his life’s story, the bare facts of it, but his personal narrative Will does not disclose. Will doesn’t care about people knowing him. He doubts they ever will. He can foresee how they will construct some distorted notion of him, because Will’s empathy knows man’s fallibility. His advances into the dark have enabled him to even discern a shade of the black of Hannibal’s abyss. 

And yet, he still tells Hannibal, cutting away the white of the marble floor. 

Hannibal is surprised, and he lets Will read this. He signals that his surprise is not in the nature of Will’s admission, but the admission itself.

His next communication, however, feels curiously outside of his making: “As a child, things like this came to me naturally. Finery was not a privilege. It simply was. I would have never known material discomfort.” 

Will, ever the close-reader of Hannibal’s words, notices the qualifier. _Would have_.

“At least, not until the death of my family. Good food and beautiful shelters would return to me after some time, when my aunt and uncle found me as an adolescent.”

While Hannibal suspects he’s always had Will’s attention, now he has the full force of his gaze and _seeing_. Hannibal will not give him everything, though. He has made himself to never be so disempowered, and not even the events of his youth were capable of rendering him that. Still, he feels a thrill, a self-defensive instinct. He cannot entirely predict Will.

“Your family died, but the loss you felt wasn’t death. It was murder,” Will says. “It was defilement.”

_Yes_

“You knew material discomfort, and then you knew deprivation, pain. If you seek finery now, it’s not out of nostalgic sentiment.” Will bites into the words. “It’s because it is in your power to revel.”

_Not quite_

Will shakes his head, correcting himself. “You’ve known what it is to survive and overpower. You see precious things as a testament to your survival. You see them as tools to overpower. Not in the conventional sense, by virtue of having. No. In the ways that they betray the greedy and the irreverent. Those who would try to use finery to hide their true natures, when it only reveals them all the more clearly.”

_Dear, dear Will._

Hannibal swallows around his awe, his violation. “Man’s lesser nature is not unknown to you either, is it, Will? He of vanity and posture would call you broken, a thing to be protected or pitied. But he does not see. You see. You know. Your nature exceeds all others. You are…a singular, exquisite creature.”

Hannibal watches Will lick his lips, flex his fingers. 

He says slowly, in surprisingly even tones, “one might say something similar about you.”

Hannibal smiles. “Let’s hope it’s the right one.”

Will’s eyes are roiling blue. And then he gives Hannibal the greatest gift of all: his rudeness. He rolls them. “Should I be apologizing right now or something?” He sounds somewhat awkward, but not with discomfort.

“Whatever for?” Hannibal says innocently. “You are perfect company, dear Will.”

Will snorts. “We both know that’s not true.”

“No apologies are necessary, but if you insist.” Hannibal tilts his head back in the direction of the counter.

Will drags his heel on the marble more violently. “Well, you did say it’s _not_ necessary…” Will must read something on Hannibal’s face that the doctor cannot conceal quickly enough. It only makes the corner of Will’s mouth rise up in vicious glee. “Are you a good cook?”

Hannibal’s not sure if he should be irked or intrigued. “Others would have me believe so.”

Will’s eyes flicker back at the store. “You also told me to trust you. I s’pose I’ll defer to the chef.”

Hannibal thinks he’s never been more delighted, being allowed to treat someone else. 

They re-enter the streets with _sorbetto di fragole_ in finely-spun sugar cones. Now that he’s exited the oppressive decadence of the shop (and is no longer compelled to physically dismantle it), Will enjoys his sorbetto just as earnestly as he enjoyed his lunch. He devours it, trying to keep it from melting away. Hannibal watches Will slip a finger through the ice, churned into creamy suppleness and crimson as striking as the fat in human flesh. Will’s cheeks hollow around his thumb. He catches some of the freely flowing drops by lifting the sweet over his face, and they drip onto his outstretched tongue.

Rudeness has made individuals tantalizing to Hannibal before, but certainly not like Will.

Hannibal folds his empty wrapper into a precise square. He catches Will staring.

“Other interns will envy you, having hands like that,” Will observes, and Hannibal can’t tell if it’s entirely innocently. “Probably helps with cooking, too.”

Will compliments as freely as he contests. “They also do me no disservice on the theremin.”

“Theremin? Most people settle for the piano.”

Hannibal is not surprised that Will recognizes the instrument. “When it comes to keyboards, I prefer the harpsichord to piano.”

“And they’re not even the only instruments you play,” Will says dryly, and Hannibal replies with incriminating silence. “That doesn’t seem fair. You’re probably going to be a wildly successful surgeon, or as successful in any other medical field. You cook, you draw, and you make music.”

Hannibal lets himself enjoy the praise. “You are very accomplished yourself, Will. You’re bright and learned, and will no doubt become a scholar of renown. Your intelligence is not limited to the arts, however— you have a unique capacity to read human behavior. You will be the envy of the whole of psychiatry and law. And you are self-sufficient in ways academics only dream of.”

“Because I can fix a boat-engine,” Will says plainly.

“It complements your ability to fish. You’d be surprised how many people do not know where their food comes from and are incapable of sourcing it themselves.” Hannibal can’t help it. “Those who will not value you do not deserve your gifts.”

Will laughs. “Careful, Hannibal. Today’s raised the bar for treating me well impossibly high.”

_So much better to root out the unworthy._ Hannibal smiles. “Not impossibly.”

“Not impossibly, maybe. If we went to a show, then it would be impossibly high.”

“Would that I could take you to the opera, Will,” Hannibal laments and makes Will laugh again.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” says Will.

“Is it obvious?”

Something seems to occur to the younger man then. It’s not yet dusk, but the sun has fallen low enough to spin fierce golden light from Will’s hair. 

“Might not be the opera, but I think I know something,” Will says. 

He reaches his fingers around Hannibal’s elbow, resting his hand on the inside of the other man’s arm before gently pulling him forward. 

Hannibal is only too happy to follow his lead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All!
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!


	4. Follow/Inferno I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All!
> 
> Part two of this week's double update! In terms of cultural references, the street musicians are based off a real Florentine group: Rom Draculas, who have an actual album La Piu Bella del Mondo! Look it up and listen if you're curious for some of the soundtrack to this fic...
> 
> Apologies for any language errors and will correct as needed.
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.

_VII. Follow/Seguire._ Will.

Will shouldn’t be doing this.

And he wouldn’t, under ordinary circumstances. The good food has left him buoyant, even the sorbetto from that ridiculous dessert place. It _was_ good sorbetto. 

The breeze is nice and cool, too, now that the sun is finally coming down. Through the buildings, Will can see the clouds are stripes of gold, blazing rays streaming forth. What little he can make of the river is also rippling light and dark. The dwindling Florentine sun paints everything that had once been too bright with smoldering radiance.

It makes it difficult for Will to tear his eyes away from Hannibal’s elegantly illuminated profile.

They walk the streets close together. Their shoulders brush as they turn a corner. Will wonders if he’s imagining it, feeling the sigh of Hannibal’s breath in his hair. 

That’s why Will shouldn’t be doing this.

He doesn’t do dates, at least before today. The safe thing would’ve been to call it a day after they’d finished their sweets. Maybe, hopefully, they’d make plans to meet again. Will’s still in Florence for a couple of weeks before he and his class go to Rome and Naples. He doesn’t know how long Hannibal intends to stay for his vacation.

He just wants it to last a little longer, though. All of it. Eating with Hannibal, speaking with Hannibal, learning about Hannibal. 

Will won’t fully confess to his last, dangerous thought.

Hannibal blinks, hearing the music already. He has very sharp ears. Will’s not sure if someone with Hannibal’s tastes even likes street music, but the ensemble had pleasantly surprised Will. Lively but soothing, their music had eased him as he’d wandered blearily his first day in the city’s center. 

His nightmares still find him halfway across the globe. 

Two older gentlemen play the violin and cello, while a slightly younger one strums a guitar. A smattering of people have no doubt returned from their sight-seeing, and they form a loose ring around the street musicians. Usually, Will prefers listening in passing. Everything feels more immediate now— the sound closer, the crowd hotter. 

“I did say it wasn’t the opera,” Will states, but he can see Hannibal is pleased. 

“You think I only enjoy classical music, Will?”

“And classical art.” Will smirks. 

The tune is upbeat, and Will enjoys the thrum that goes through his stomach with the plucks of the cello’s strings. The violin comes in, raising the energy of the sound. 

“‘How high the moon,’” Will says to Hannibal’s surprise, laughing. “Louisiana, remember? Jazz was part of my upbringing, too.” 

“I thought I recognized the melody,” Hannibal muses, because, _of course_.

“Jazz _and_ classical music.” 

“Untrained ears often don’t realize that improvisation is as much finesse as it is spontaneity,” Hannibal says, his ash-gold hair more vivid in the waxing streetlights. The breeze has swept some of it over his proud brow. 

Will wants to test whether it’s as silken as it looks with his fingers. The tempo has loosened his limbs, but a spring-tight sensation coils in his gut. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when it snaps.

“It’s practicing performing with others,” Will says, “that allows the musicians to make something new with the melody.”

He reaches over, brushing his knuckles against Hannibal’s crown to push a lock back in place. 

Hannibal is suddenly closer to him. He leans into the side of Will’s face to say, low and soft, “Isn’t this where you ask me to dance, dear Will?”

Needing air but also to touch, Will grabs the lapels of Hannibal’s coat, pulling back to look him in his smug, handsome face. “Not in Louisiana, and not even in Florence, Hannibal.”

“Pity. I would follow where you lead me.” Hannibal presses his fingers over Will’s, so that Will’s palms are flat on either side of Hannibal’s chest. “And I quite enjoy the waltz.”

“This isn’t the right melody.” Will can feel the gradual rise and fall of Hannibal’s breath. His heartbeat is even. It grounds Will, even in the noise and the crowd. His finger traces out lyrics on Hannibal’s jacket. He’s firm and warm to Will’s touch.

“What does it say?” Hannibal asks, even though he also knows the words.

Will absolutely refuses to sing them. His voice is playful, however, as he recites, “’somewhere there's music; how faint the tune.’” The sound swirls around him, fading as he and Hannibal come closer together.

“’Somewhere there's heaven; how high the moon,’” Will teases into Hannibal’s ear. Hannibal’s cheekbone drags against the skin of Will’s face like it might cut it open. 

“’There is no moon above when love is far away, too, ‘till it comes true. That you love me as I love you.’”

They’re not dancing, but one of Hannibal’s hands is on Will’s hip. He thumbs slow circles into the faint dip of Will’s pelvic bone. Will’s right hand closes a little more tightly around Hannibal’s jacket.

The song has changed, probably song and song ago. Pre-recorded piano plays somewhat tinny in the street, and the violinist joins.

“ _La più bella del mondo_ ,” Hannibal says.

“Pop music, too,” Will jokes, taking a moment to recognize the tune, too. His voice is quieter than he wants it to be, but it’s hard, having to consciously regulate his volume now. Hannibal’s fingers are low on his hip and halfway underneath the hem of Will’s shirt, thumbing the skin near his stomach, almost caressing the lower knobs of his spine. 

Their foreheads are centimeters from touching. Hannibal’s hair has fallen into his face again. He murmurs, “Not just classical.”

“‘The most beautiful in the world,’” Will translates the title. “I know.”

Will shivers at the ghost of fingertips on his throat. Hannibal’s holding his jaw ever so gently. Will’s eyes, wide, unblinking, fall just short of meeting Hannibal’s. They’d be, he thinks, endless dark.

“Do you, Will?”

Will’s whole body seems to react to Hannibal’s words. Tremors runs through him head to toe. And Hannibal feels it, digs his fingers into Will more tightly, runs his thumb over Will’s lower lip. 

Will finally raises his gaze and meets Hannibal’s.

_That’s it,_ Will thinks. He sees the other man’s eyes, and the deep red is now pitched to black, rich and complex under the moonlight. 

Just like Will imagined.

He removes one of Hannibal’s hands with more gentleness than he thought his arousal would make possible. 

Will laces their fingers together, extricating himself and Hannibal from the crowd. He prays that none of his classmates are here. He’s not sure he could survive _that_. They’re not far from the Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizi gallery. Not that his peers would have lingered around to explore the Historic Center, an almost aggravatingly charming young doctor in tow. Which reminds him—

“I have a roommate,” he tells Hannibal, because this is Florence, not his university, and he doesn’t know what to do with all this desperate need. 

“Would you come back to my apartment?” Hannibal asks with a voice like he’s swallowed gravel.

“No. Another night. After drinks, and I mean real drinks.” Will hopes Hannibal knows what he means, knows he doesn’t date but he’s never wanted someone like this. He wraps his hands on the back of Hannibal’s corded neck and leans into him. Hannibal must have a great barber— the end of his haircut is so clean, so much like this man, Will would laugh if his throat weren’t so tight. “Maybe I’ll persuade you to cook for me. You wouldn’t stay in a place _without_ a fancy kitchen.”

It could be the idea of having Will in Hannibal’s room. Will thinks, however, that cooking for Will, that’s the older man’s turn-on. He groans, and Will’s body is already memorizing the sound.

“I may know a place,” Hannibal says. 

Will follows him through the darkening streets. The blue of the sky is still somewhat pale, so it’s fairly visible when they come into a park. One or two visitors are sleepy, meandering. At the edge of the park, the vegetation is dense and parts into a small courtyard cloistered between two buildings with high, boarded windows. Flowers and foliage choke the trellises, petals curling with pale peels of paint. The single stone bench is covered in dust, maybe moss, though it’s hard to tell in the umbra of the space. Will thinks this courtyard is very rarely maintained, and never visited.

“Here for some quiet reading time, are you?” Will chuckles.

“It _is_ close to Dante’s house.”

Hannibal has Will pressed against the wall in a moment. 

_VIII. Inferno_ _I/Lower world; fire_. Hannibal.

Will’s mouth tastes like all Hannibal has hoped for. 

The remnants of strawberry sorbetto— bright, tangy, a burst of sharp and mellow— perfectly accent Will’s personal characteristics. Hannibal presses a chaste kiss against one corner of Will’s lips and pauses, careful, as if to exchange the fruit between them. 

Then, he opens his jaw wide and unfurls his tongue to span the seam of Will’s mouth. He licks a broad, hungry stripe to the opposite edge. 

The noise Will makes is high and shocked. Hannibal can be gentle, but he won’t be modest. 

Will’s teeth are on him, not punitive but impatient, tugging Hannibal inside where it’s hot and facile as if Will’s every nerve ending is already aflame. The taste hits Hannibal, powerful, almost heady: prickling salt and bitter, honeyed sweetness. Their lunch. 

Hannibal groans and moves to draw out as many of the flavors as he can. He pries Will’s mouth open with his thumbs, searching the cavern of his mouth for the smoothness of his teeth, the firm wet of the back of his throat. 

Will’s moan is loud and unrestrained and reverberates like pure _aching_ through Hannibal.

They pull, pull, pull each other close, chest to chest, face to face, jostling closer, further away. Hannibal ushers Will against the brick, pinning him with his whole body. Instead of resisting, he feels the young man’s spine unwind, a sinuous arch from the dip in his lower back to the wings of his shoulder blades. He flows under Hannibal’s grasp, molten, beautiful and mellifluous like a treble cleft, all of Will loose and needy.

Hannibal can’t remember the last time he wanted something so completely.

Clever boy. 

Remarkable.

_Will, Will, Will_ — Hannibal confesses his yearning with the constant invocation of Will’s name, and only that— he’s grown to immensely enjoy it, its shape and qualities. The most satisfying, bite-sized morsel that could ever lie on his tongue.

“Will,” he breathes.

Will is more responsive to Hannibal calling him than to any touch. His skin rolls beautifully under the press of Hannibal’s body, hot and powerful. The younger man gasps, almost protesting, between Hannibal’s words, breath surging like heat waves through any space inside their joined mouths that their tongues and teeth don’t already occupy. Hannibal is suctioned into the hollow of Will’s cheek by the force of his kisses, and he feels every undulating surface movement. 

Hannibal hadn’t expected Will to be so enthusiastic with his appetites, so uninhibited with his devouring. The realization floods him with want. His fingers itch with an absolute desire that usually entails destruction and creation, artistry and defilement, all at once. 

Hannibal wants to unmake Will—he wants to build him up again, desire and pain, giving and taking, over and over. 

Still, could there ever be a more magnificent sight than Will like this? 

He’s half-bare, shirt opened and hanging from his wrists, his skin effulgent and smooth and his features beautifully accentuated in the chiaroscuro half-light. Hannibal’s gaze follows the stark illumination and shadow showcasing the strong, pronounced curves of Will’s shoulders; his chest is a subtle, silver slope leading down into his stomach; his abdomen, taut and lean, rises and falls with the exertion of his arousal, framed low by the slim, floral ridges of Will’s hips. 

Hannibal wants to admire the perfect and imperfect art that is Will. He wants to revere him. He wants to break him.

When he drags his blunt nails down Will’s skin, it shudders and erupts in gooseflesh. A strangled sound bursts from Will, as if he’s realizing the marks that will remain. He grabs Hannibal’s shoulders tightly as the doctor falls to his knees. He whispers. He curses with a mouth that contains as many barbs as it does delicacies. Hannibal’s fingers fan into the spaces between Will’s ribs, only tangible the moment his skin draws in sharp, staggered inhalation. If he pressed brutally enough, Hannibal could bruise the flesh above the bone; with adequate power, he could clasp Will’s lungs in their throbbing, burning substantiality.

Hannibal doesn’t press that deeply. He wants to see how far he can get inside Will without.

With painstaking slowness, his mouth makes a scalding path down to where Will’s flesh disappears under his jeans. 

“Hannibal…” Will groans. He throws his head back, his neck exposed and so tempting were Hannibal not already dedicated to other pursuits.

There, against the skin of Will’s abdomen, Hannibal can clearly feel the younger man’s trembling exhalations, his jolts of surprise. He kisses the area more tenderly, more searchingly than he’d expected. Almost with devotion. 

Desire emanates like fire on Will’s skin. It’s smoky, and it’s unrelenting, and the fine flesh of Will’s stomach pulses as Hannibal runs his tongue over it. He nips the ridge of Will’s navel, and the expanse of skin quivers.

“May I?” Hannibal asks. A finger nearly loops into the opening of Will’s jeans. 

When Will looks at him, his eyes are darkness, limned with thin halos of electric-blue. He takes a moment to catch his breath, and then Will says, tongue a slip of crimson, “Don’t stop.”

His fingers curl into Hannibal’s hair, and with the slightest motion, Hannibal opens up his jeans. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a sort-of cliff-hanger!
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.


	5. Inferno II/Come

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All,
> 
> My apologies again for the lateness of this update and for not yet responding to comments. I have read them, and they are a continual source of inspiration and loveliness in my life. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me! I intend to respond shortly!
> 
> I plan to put up another chapter tomorrow, so please keep posted.
> 
> My best wishes for everybody to take care in this precarious moment. My thoughts to go out to everyone and their loved ones, and considering the backdrop of this fic, to those in Italy especially, where pandemic has wrought such a hard toll. Be safe. Be well. 
> 
> And I hope this fic offers those who read it at least a little diversion from their troubles.

_IX. Inferno II/ Hell; raging_. Will. 

He’s sure it’s a good look, Hannibal on his knees before Will. Will has every reason to think so, but with his eyes shut tight, trying to hold onto a jolt of _pure pleasure_ — well, he’s not really able to tell. 

Hannibal treats him like the finest of meals, using his tongue to explore the taste and temperature of Will. He’d sampled the texture of Will’s flesh with the scraping of his teeth. Every so often, he’d paused in his pathway down, down, down, scenting the specific pleasures of each region of Will’s body.

Will thinks the phrase _thoroughly fucked_ has never been so accurate.

“Christ!” comes out of Will’s mouth, repeated in a string of increasingly lost moans, as nimble lips enclose his aching heat and hardness. 

Will’s spine feels like the lightning rod of Hannibal’s ministrations: currents of electricity course through it with every dig of Hannibal’s fingers into Will’s buttocks— every feathery brush of Hannibal’s blond hair against Will’s pelvis— every maddening swirl and sweet shift in suction Hannibal’s tongue applies to Will’s cock. 

Arousal spikes so completely through Will it’s like he’s being physically split open. A chasm opens up inside him, of heat and need and angry, desperate desire. The young man entices Hannibal more to him, first by using words that are filthier and more demanding than Will’s ever spoken and that he doesn’t regret at all (Hannibal, undeterred, doesn’t appear to mind either). When language doesn’t urge the other man fast enough, Will grabs Hannibal wherever he can get purchase: he digs his fingers into the rippling muscles of his shoulders, strong and riotous as the ocean. Fuck if that doesn’t want to make Will lose himself in the other man more entirely. He clutches the side of Hannibal’s face and the silk of his hair. Without pause, Will hauls the other man more deeply around him so Will can sink into his greedy maws.

Hannibal answers by enveloping Will as completely as he can. 

_Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck_ —

His silent curses turn out to be very vocal, Will learns, when Hannibal laughs around Will, and the vibrations send Will bending sharply over the doctor’s head, his core utterly undone. 

Hannibal’s hands migrate the front of Will’s thighs, pressing him more firmly against the wall. Part of Will manages to keep upright. The other half of him wraps his arms around Hannibal’s shoulders, clutching at the firm ridges of his back for balance as the other man sucks Will within an inch of his life. 

After today, Hannibal will know just how proficient Will is at cursing. He babbles through the feeling that builds and builds, more unbearably good and more unbearably hot in his gut by the second, “fuck, god, Hannibal, don’t stop, don’t stop, I can’t— Jesus, oh fuck! It’s… Hannibal. Hell—!”

Will’s head is practically hanging on Hannibal’s shoulders now, and his fingers are gripping the other man’s back so intensely Will thinks they may snap. 

Hannibal tips his head back more and _swallows_ Will ever so sweetly.

A voiceless shout and blood roaring in his ears accompany Will’s release. Hannibal holds up Will’s shuddering, shivering body, never removing his mouth as Will comes down from the edge.

His breath is hard, his vision spotty as Will sinks down on his ass to meet Hannibal. Hannibal, of course, looks absurdly satisfied, the gourmand. His hair is completely disheveled, and his throat gleams gold even in the dark.

Will is ravenous. With a grace that surprises him, his leans into the space of Hannibal’s chest.

His mouth presses against Hannibal’s cheek, and his fingers slide down the front of the man’s trousers. His palm presses down and his fingers twist. He feels the other man’s pleasure pulse. Hannibal’s breath grows more shallow and wanting.

“My turn,” Will says, and he takes Hannibal’s ear between his teeth.

Will pulls open Hannibal’s trousers. He begins his expert analyses of Hannibal’s length, taking his sweet time as he slides with rough palms and deftly strokes with calloused fingers. Will knows he’s rather… _dexterous_ , with the fishing, sailing, and mechanics. Hannibal groans, and Will’s mouth pulls the soft flesh of his earlobe. The other man’s voice becomes a low, luxurious moan as Will runs his tongue over the cartilage shell. 

Will might be no aficionado of high culture, but he also craves beauty and prizes art. 

Every aspect of Hannibal has a profound and disarming allure to him. Will wishes he could call it simple enchantment, regard for beauty; but he knows, even as pleasure congeals into luscious delirium throughout him, that his attraction isn’t so straightforward. Still, he can’t… turn away from it. 

Hannibal slakes and stirs his hunger. 

His hands occupied, Will uses his mouth to rediscover and try to convey the depths of his appreciation. Gliding from Hannibal’s ear, he nibbles the clean lines of the man’s jaw, exhales against the knob of his Adam’s apple. Hannibal’s sweat is briny and radiant, and Will enjoys it like he had his sorbetto, lapping up the drops of perspiration as he slides over to Hannibal’s other ear. Will’s lips trace the strong curve of Hannibal’s brow, kissing the lids of his deep-set eyes, relishing in feeling them flutter with the throes of Hannibal’s ecstasy. Will meets the sharpness of Hannibal’s cheekbones with his teeth, and loves seeing the flow of dark blood there. Gently, precisely, Will’s bottom lip follows the bridge of Hannibal aquiline nose all the way down to the man’s sensuous lips. The kiss he presses there is light. 

He feels Hannibal’s breath in uneven, tight shudders. The flesh between Will’s hands is hot and dripping. With kindness or cruelty—he cannot tell—Will twists his fingers against the stiffness between Hannibal’s legs, and he feels the throbbing, the incredible hardness, the incipient release.

Hannibal’s breath quickens, and Will latches onto the other man’s mouth fiercely, hungrily, deeply. A dark thrill runs through him as senses Hannibal struggle to keep up with Will’s relentless kisses. Will’s tongue is insistent as it catalogs the ridges of Hannibal’s hard palate. He can taste the bitterness of his own pleasure inside, and he wants Hannibal to taste Will’s blood, too, as he moves roughly, maybe carelessly, over Hannibal’s sharp teeth. With his ever searching lips, Will pushes into Hannibal’s mouth and pulls the other man closer to him, back and forth, catch and release, desiring all the shapes Hannibal’s lips can make. Will sucks the bottom lip hard between his teeth and bites to draw blood.

“Will,” Hannibal says in either a gasp or a plea. 

“Come,” Will says, knowing Hannibal intimately with his hands and his mouth. He presses together their brows, urging Hannibal’s eyes open, and then he demands with his gaze. “Come.”

Hannibal growls and paints Will’s hands with heat. 

_X. Come/Venire_. Hannibal. 

The afterglow of pleasure often rewards Hannibal with his moments of greatest clarity. Post-coital lucidity has helped him compose music. In exceptional cases, it has aided the executions of his deadlier pieces of art— though it is not strictly required. 

Right now, as he slows his breathing and lets the memories of sheer bodily bliss course through him, Hannibal’s _exquisitely_ still mind begins to plan the days in Florence with Will at his side. 

Will’s lips are bright and swollen from their outright plundering of Hannibal’s mouth. He’s almost smiling as he lets Hannibal stop him from buttoning his shirt back again. Hannibal drags slow circles over Will’s sternum, his last sensual exploration of the night (though he suspects not entirely). While Will’s temperature is still deliciously high from his exertion and arousal, his sweat is beginning to cool.

“You know.” Will’s voice is husky, and he coughs to clear it. “A whirlwind romance wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I flew all the way across the Atlantic.” Will chuckles, rearranging Hannibal’s hair. “Mostly paintings and poetry. And houses of dead painters and poets.”

“I don’t want to assume which you enjoy better,” says Hannibal, Will’s fingers soothing on his scalp. Will is likely the first partner he’s had who speaks of death so shortly after sex. Hannibal thinks it makes him more remarkable. “Though I have my hopes.”

“Well, I know what _I’m_ hoping, though you did seem pretty enamored with the Botticelli.”

Hannibal laughs, and because Will has returned to buttoning his flannel, Hannibal smooths back his curls, resisting his first impulse to tighten his fist into their wild voluptuousness. 

“What else do you hope for?” Hannibal asks, curling a dark strand so lightly around one finger. 

Will’s cleaned his hands on Hannibal’s handkerchief, and he looks about as presentable as he’d been when Hannibal met him at the Uffizi. Will’s excitement remains in the charged sapphire of his eyes and the high color in his cheeks. 

“I hope,” Will says, “you’re not leaving Florence too soon.”

“We share the same hopes, then,” Hannibal smiles, and they re-emerge from trees and vines onto a street. “No, not too soon. You?”

“My class is here for a couple more weeks. Then, who knows where my professor will lead us. I should just have _you_ guide me around the rest of Florence’s cultural past. You’re more knowledgeable about the subject than he is. Not that that’s my only motivation.”

“I’d be happy to start by guiding you back to your accommodations,” Hannibal says, tacitly and whole-heartedly agreeing to Will’s last admission. 

Will snorts. “No, you wouldn’t. My professor’s almost as cheap as I am. A countryside villa turned student hostel sounds nice until you realize it’s an hour’s walk from the city. Even better, it’s on a hill. We’ll probably kill ourselves trying to get there in the dark.” Will’s hand finds Hannibal’s shoulder. “You can accompany me to my bus stop, though.”

“Where to?”

“Piazza San Marco.” A passing car limns Will in neon. “Where are you staying?”

“Palazzo Capponi alle Rovinate. It’s less than ten minutes away from here on foot.”

Will and Hannibal cross a bridge. The view from Hannibal’s apartment is not dissimilar. From his terrace, Hannibal can see the river Arno. Right now, the black waters of both locations on the river look identical.

Will seems to be considering the view as well. “That’s not far at all,” he comments.

Then, over the scents of stone roads and the river, Hannibal catches something slight but familiar. It’s only a shade of the previous potency, but the flicker is enough to bring Hannibal’s mind palace straight back to the courtyard:

The fevered fragrance of Will’s desire.

“No,” Hannibal says slowly. “Not at all.”

It will not be tonight, but Hannibal is pleased to know he’ll have Will there soon.

The piazza is unsurprisingly still flush with travelers. Buses and cabs flank the square before returning to the roads with other motorists. Hannibal can feel Will’s body tense, deposited once more into the masses. 

Does Will prefer the isolation of his hostel when the baser instincts of the city come alive in the night? How Hannibal longs to whisk him away to Florence’s nocturnal menagerie. With enough loving instruction, Will would discard the conventional morality he’s adopted, however ill-fittingly, from the minds of lesser, falser creatures. What would free itself from Will’s chrysalis the older man cannot say, but he imagines it would not be entirely unlike the calculating, restrained savagery with which Will cut and cut and _cut_ the edge of his mud-stained boot into cool, precious marble.

He thinks it will be magnificent. 

“Hannibal,” Will says, and he tugs the cuff on his sleeve. “Thanks. For today. I had a good time.”

Hannibal takes Will’s fingers and he kisses his knuckles. “As did I. And I hope to do it again, soon.”

Will, conscious of their publicity, is embarrassed and pleased. “Yeah? How soon?”

“I leave that up to you. You are the scholar. Your mission here is to learn. I am on holiday, and it is my mission to indulge myself. For me, there will never be soon enough.”

Will looks like he wants to press Hannibal like a glass to his lips and drink deeply. “When’s the opera in town?”

Oh, vexing, perfectly consumable Will. Now it’s Hannibal who wants their mouths to clash, all teeth. “I don’t suppose you’ve been to Santa Croce? This weekend, there will be an outdoor performance I am particularly looking forward to. _Vide Cor Meum_ , based on sonnets from Dante’s _La Vita Nuova_. It’s an original composition.”

Will and Hannibal have found formidable partners in each other.

“You’re kidding,” the younger man says furiously.

“It _is_ compatible with your curriculum.”

“How fancy is the outdoor variety of opera? Because I don’t even have a three piece suit back in the states.”

“I may have something you can borrow,” Hannibal says, though he wishes he could have an ensemble tailored precisely to Will’s physique and complexion. Such a suit would last Will awhile— and Hannibal is almost certain the young man would never let him custom-order another.

Reading Hannibal’s train of thought— the older man was confident he could conceal them _before_ Will came into his orbit— Will’s eyes widen in horror. 

“A jacket and slacks would suffice,” Hannibal backtracks. 

Will looks like he wants to protest but sees his bus coming forward. He pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and writes something down. He tears a corner and gives it to Hannibal.

“My address,” Will says, though his eyes flash _don’t think you’ve won._

Hannibal scans the letters and numbers, and stores the note away in his breast pocket. “So I might persuade you another day.”

“On the off-chance that you deign to ride a bus over,” Will scoffs. As if he foresees Hannibal’s ire, the younger man leans in and kisses him softly. 

Hannibal holds Will longer with a hand on his waist. “I’ll drive myself over. A motorcycle is a great way to get around all parts of the city,” Hannibal says.

He smiles into Will’s stunned expression. 

“And you ride one,” Will says.

Hannibal nods, and Will turns toward the rapidly filling bus. “You’re lucky I like Dante,” Will says. “I’ll wear a suit and tie. _You’ll_ wear your leather jacket. Even Steven.”

That would be highly inappropriate at any opera. Before Hannibal can say so, Will is on his bus, and it takes off into the night. 

Hannibal never dresses down, as his person-suit necessitates. However, if the lingering of a fevered, sweet odor is anything to go by, Hannibal and Will’s plans for attire might be perfectly appropriate. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who have seen the Hannibal film, Vide Cor Meum (translated in English as "See My Heart") is the opera Hannibal attends on the run as Doctor Fell in Florence! This will be an important event in this fic, too!
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts, and will share the next chapter very soon!


	6. Vide Cor Meum/Amore Carnale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All,
> 
> Here's a little Monday update to get us back on schedule! Again, my apologies for any improperly translated Italian, and I will revise as necessary.
> 
> Take care, and thank you so much for reading and sharing your thoughts. You are a wonderful community of readers.

_XI. Vide cor meum/ See my heart_. Will.

“Of course he rides a damned motorcycle,” Will mutters into his hand. Based on his reflection in the bus window, at least he’s managing to hide his grin.

_Of course._

If there is anything tonight’s made clear to Will, it’s that Hannibal’s proper impropriety itself. One moment they’re waxing philosophy about nymphs, the next giving and receiving hand jobs and blowjobs in a public park. No gentleman ends the first date with incredible oral sex. 

Will’s not sure any gentleman’s as capable of giving incredible oral sex as Hannibal.

“Fuck.”

Will’s said that too loudly, he realizes, when his seatmate glares in his direction. Just his luck— it’s a nun, very clearly dressed in her habit and moral austerity. 

Will reads, however, that this woman is not only responding to his swearing. This is a person who removes herself from sin, reserves her body and soul for divine grace, and she doesn’t appreciate having to sit near a man so impure — she’d seen Will practically hanging onto another man, in public no less, and everyone else had barely registered it — this woman congratulates herself for safeguarding her decency in a city that is obviously full of degenerates— she’ll have to pray for herself, pray for them all—

Will’s nails cut rosy half-moons into his palms. 

Who is this stranger to use him as a prop for her self-aggrandizement? When she sees Will and Hannibal, Will’s nature is perverted, wrong.

Never in the company of anyone else has Will felt so himself, so _right_.

With Hannibal, he doesn’t need to tolerate moral grandstanding. He is free to rend apart opulence. His empathy may reach, untethered, into another’s mind to dissect their pain and pleasure and motivations, laying it with calm and clarity for the other to see. After missing out on fine meals and avoiding human contact, he can gorge himself on every flavor of the flesh and peel apart and gulp down and lick up and fuck. 

“ _You’re_ late.”

Will nearly jumps out of his skin when he enters the hostel’s foyer.

“You missed dinner, Mr. Graham,” his professor says, but he isn’t reprimanding. 

Will sees his professor’s excitement, and he hopes this doesn’t turn into another attempt to enlist Will over to the side of classical charm and wonder. 

“I’m glad to see you’re finally discovering what Florence is about,” his professor grins, patting Will’s shoulder amiably. 

The man’s happy, really happy. Crap. It usually exhausts and irritates him, but Will feels pretty bad now having to disappoint the guy every time Will insists he’s going into law enforcement, not conferences about the Renaissance. This is the first time Will’s returned to the hostel after sundown, and he gives the appearance of having lost himself in the majesty of the city. 

“Yeah. I guess so,” Will responds.

Will’s professor claps him on the back again, harder. He is positively beaming, which Will feels is a little bit much. Even for this man. Would Will enjoying Florence really be all that…?

Will grabs his collar and _yanks_ it up his neck.

His professor’s eyes confirm Will’s suspicions only moments before the old man laughs from his gut. 

“You surprise me, Mr. Graham! It’s good to see your head out of the books and enjoying some _amore carnale_!”

Will’s face feels like flame. “I’m going to bed. Now.”

“You do that, Mr. Graham.” His professor’s eyes are twinkling. 

Will launches himself up the stairs and races into the bathroom. He slams the door.

“The fuck, Graham?” his roommate shouts, banging on the wall.

If Will was the type of person who buttoned his shirt up completely, like _someone else_ he knows, the mark wouldn’t be visible. It’s right where his neck dives in to meet his collarbones: a clear set of teeth, top row and bottom row, pressed into the darkening blossom of a bruise.

“Goddamnit, Hannibal.”

This is going to make things more complicated. 

Not just because of the shirts it’ll keep at the bottom of Will’s already light suitcase for the next couple of days. 

This particular piece of physical evidence only confirms something Will’s grasped throughout his and Hannibal’s encounter. 

It’s sucked and nipped on an area that’s part skin and part bone, part soft and part hard. The damage is irregular, even if the bite marks look clean, and healing will be slow, delayed. There will be enough persistent discoloration and tenderness that Will won’t forget it, especially when he feels it to swallow.

Examining the mark, Will closes his eyes and _sees_ : Hannibal carefully considers the bite. He decides he needs to damage the flesh, no hesitation. He ascertains just how forcefully to apply his body as a weapon, wielding it with confidence, calculating a surface and deep wounding to his liking. 

Will knows so much of human decency is only surface. 

It’s not _decency_ in the deep places of the mind, nor in the raw nerve endings. 

The things people try to gild with smiles and manners and mundanity, they’re always _there_. No one can avoid them. Will certainly can’t. Because people are so desperate to deny them, or convince themselves that it’s okay, because there are others out there far worse, the... shortcomings —no, foibles—no, _deficiencies_ — well, sometimes, they just _buzz_ and chatter like insect swarms. Other times, there’s a trigger, and then rage-grief-mania surges forth, wild and drowning. Then the enormity of the destructive impulses ebb, back to irritants haunting the subconscious. Give them time, though, because Will knows they’re in a constant steady rise up to the surface, aching for release once more.

When Will feels into Hannibal’s mind, the dark is quiet. It practices a silent restraint, a firm control. The darkness has no edges, no horizon. 

Just vastness. 

It goes on endlessly in every direction, because it renders up and down meaningless concepts. It’s a dark that makes its logic, _itself_ , entirely. 

It is singular, exquisitely wrought. There are probably no words for how _dangerous_.

In bed, Will curls in on himself under the covers. His roommate silently glares at him and the open window; he’s given up complaining vocally a couple days back, because Will’s adept at ignoring _fuck you, Graham_ ’s. The breeze usually helps ease some of Will’s discomfort when he wakes up from his nightmares covered in sweat. 

The soles of Will’s feet are sore from all the treading unfamiliar paths. Lying down, he can feel the strain of his entire body. It brings memories of day’s-old pleasure and pain. 

Maybe, he shouldn’t have given Hannibal his address. 

Will’s not sure they can survive each other. 

But, he’s also not sure they can survive the separation. 

_XII. Amore carnale/Carnal love_. Hannibal.

Tuesday: Hannibal sits in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, pleased with the opportunity to return to Dante. He’s very partial to _Inferno_. That being the case, _La Vita Nuova_ — A New Life— and its allusions are quite… extraordinary.

Hannibal tries to write his letters. But the prose and sonnets keep bringing him back to Will. He thinks about _Primavera_ and _Metamorphoses_ and wants to pick Will’s mind over Dante’s conflicted characters and symbols that register romance and horror at once.

He’s sure Will would listen to Hannibal’s thoughts. And in an instant, he’ll use his own close-readings as support. Or, with equal vigor, he’ll choose to oppose Hannibal and rake cutting words through the fault lines of the other man’s seemingly sound logic. As much as Will savors challenging Hannibal, his voice will absolutely not waver.

Resuming his letters, Hannibal brings his pen down on gently perfumed paper, scratching into the silence of the library.

Wednesday: The scent of Hannibal’s tailor is particularly happy and confused. The man’s Pavlovian response to seeing the doctor enter his shop, and imagining the money he’ll spend, seems at war with his dread. The sight and smell almost makes Hannibal forget his impatience. Almost.

He’s had to explain his request to have a coat and shirt customized for his motorcycle jacket twice now. Hannibal admits, even with his more ostentatious ensembles, he’s never asked for something like this. Before, he’s never had reason to.

“ _Mi scusi, signore, per quale motivo?_ ”

In the end, his tailor manages to reassure Hannibal that he’ll do what he asks. He’s always produced good work in the past. Hannibal gets his measurements done and pays the man extra for the rush job (and the utterly satisfied smell the man gives off has Hannibal certain he’ll reap the benefits of his newest creation).

As he’s leaving, he notices a ready-made suit. 

It’s not something Hannibal would wear. For an Italian suit, it’s surprisingly simple, functional, and almost plain. 

Still, the waist of the jacket is trim and elegant. It has pinstripes so fine they glint against a canvas of dark. At first glance it looks black, but upon closer inspection it transforms into midnight blue, one perfectly changeable and streaked with stormy light.

Thursday: The evening rain is fine. It becomes a mist over the Arno.

By Hannibal’s feet, a corpse is all paleness, no vivid splashes of color. The sallow skin bleeds with rain-washed pink that seeps into the riverbank. By morning, it will have never been there.

The motions with which Hannibal disposes the body are almost as mechanical and dispassionate as the kill itself. Not one of his finest or more fulfilling works. If Hannibal were less than entirely self-possessed, he might even think he’d just killed this time for the sake of the kill, adhering to routine comforts. But that would make him pedestrian, even… _predictable_. Hannibal could shudder at the thought.

Instead, he simply settles the body into the river, and doesn’t even take pleasure in watching the weighted limbs carry it down below.

Friday: At his fitting, Hannibal assesses his tailor’s progress on his suit, satisfied to see what it will become. His tailor observes the figure it cuts on Hannibal’s shoulders and chest and legs and plans adjustments before the piece is finalized.

“ _È un'occasione speciale, no?_ ” the tailor’s daughter asks politely but with what Hannibal can tell is real interest.

“ _Non è sempre un'occasione speciale?_ ” He would not be surprised at the woman manufacturing small talk, but he’s slightly perplexed by her entreaty’s earnestness. After all, for most people, such expensive requests usually require some significant occasion. 

The woman’s gaze moves. In the time Hannibal has known her, she has handily demonstrated her skills at uncovering just exactly what suit her customer desires. People may tell her otherwise, but she knows the object they hold in their hearts, and then she artfully commissions it into being. 

Right now, she is looking at the ready-made blue suit, still poised on its mannequin. Hannibal is impressed— he’d resolved to put it from his mind... after thoughts of it wouldn’t leave. Since he’s been discovered, Hannibal studies it again, and finds its qualities would still perfectly complement a leanly muscled figure, one with dark curls and eyes of indescribable blue.

“ _Se questo è tutto, signore_ ,” the tailor’s daughter says, her eyes flicking between Hannibal and the suit. A smile graces her lips as they plan for Hannibal’s final return to the shop, and the smile is more knowing than Hannibal has seen her wear before. “ _Buona sera_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.


	7. La Vita Nuova/Fortuna

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All,
> 
> My best wishes to everybody during this precarious time. Here's another installment of Will and Hannibal's story, and I hope to share another chapter tomorrow!
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

_XIII. La vita nuova/ A new life._ Will.

Saturday: Will’s week has been complete and utter bullshit.

He’d barely listened to his professor spin tales of monuments and locations. When his class went to museums and galleries, Will passed it all by as if half-awake. Which he should be, because he is most of the time, even if he doesn’t look like it (Will’s roommate can attest to just how badly Will sleeps, which he has to their professor _many_ different times). 

But all week long, to Will’s ever-lasting surprise, he hasn’t startled out of his bed once. This morning is no different. When he wakes up to a beam of light streaming through his curtains, his body and laundry are dry and free from night-sweats. His mind is clear, and he recalls dreamy whispers of ebony antlers and raven feathers. What had felt like just seconds ago, they’d been vivid in his mind, so real it was like he could reach out and _touch_. 

This change Will doesn’t mind so much. He did hope with the nights of full sleep, he might go through his day feeling more energized. Instead, everything this week has seemed so incredibly _dull._

Apparently, a lack of Hannibal Lecter is all it takes to turn Florence into something colorless and banal. 

A sharp knock comes at Will’s door. A groan floats from low in the room. Will hadn’t seen his roommate come back last night, so he suspects the miserable lump underneath the other man’s covers is recovering from a bout of evening over-indulgence. 

Before his professor can barge in, Will goes over to the door, opening it to reveal none other than—

“Holy fuck!”

Will immediately clamps a hand over his own rising curse. And then, with his other, he grabs Hannibal, pulling him from the hallway into Will’s room as he quickly but quietly shuts the door behind them. 

_Holy fuck indeed_. A life with Hannibal proves to be anything but dull.

Will’s ears are ringing, and blood no doubt surging to his face, as he observes Hannibal standing before him and looking just as smug as Will remembers. He’s holding a thermos that smells like pure heaven, or maybe sin is the truer descriptor, and he’s more put together than anybody should be at this time of the day. He’s not entirely immaculate, though. His ash-blonde hair is loose and partly sweeps over his face, and Will guesses it has something to do with the motorcycle jacket that clings to his chest, wrapping Hannibal in blackness burnished like the shadows in a mirror. 

Will jerks his head over to the fabric-covered mess that is his roommate, and Hannibal inclines his head in understanding. 

“You’re here,” Will hisses.

Hannibal whispers, “As I said I would be.”

“But it’s—”

“Saturday, and past ten in the morning, Will,” Hannibal lightly reprimands. Will supposes that even without having to jolt awake from nightmares, he is still not a morning person. He’s also suddenly conscious of the fact that he’s only wearing a light t-shirt and boxers, and Hannibal’s tone isn’t _entirely_ admonishing.

Moving swiftly through the room and praying his roommate doesn’t wake up, Will retrieves some real clothes. He practically leaps into his slacks, and as he does his button-up, he feels Hannibal’s eyes and tries not to remember the other sensations that had previously accompanied their heat. 

Awkward start to their re-encounter notwithstanding, Will glides over to Hannibal and kisses him fully. He smiles when Hannibal’s lips move against his and his tongue briefly darts against Will’s teeth and into his mouth. In all this lovely return to the sensation of Hannibal, Will suppresses the nagging thought that he’s somehow also punishing his very proximate roommate. Punishing _more_ , his roommate would seethe.

“I hope that’s for me,” Will says about the container as he leans against the other man’s shoulder and pulls his boots on.

_“Un cappuccino_ ,” Hannibal responds as he hands Will the thermos. The hit of strong espresso helps wake Will up, and the sweet milk takes away the edge of dark and bitterness.

“It’s delicious,” Will says, trying to control his voice because, again, roommate. Who is already nursing not a few grievances against Will. Though Will’s beginning to think he’s nursing not an insignificant amount of his own. “You made it, didn’t you?”

Hannibal smiles his affirmation and lets Will devise their escape out the door. The hallway is quiet and empty. Will’s grateful that most of his classmates are probably experiencing the same infirmity as his roommate post-Friday night in exciting, exotic Italy. The old stairs creak beneath his and Hannibal’s weight, and his gratitude increases ten times over. He might even be blessed.

“Ah, Mr. Graham!”

Well, he did say _might_ be. 

Fuck. “A beautiful weekend to explore, is it not?” Will’s professor springs like some Shakespearean imp from behind an immense potted plant. If Will could even expect that, he would have gone around the other way. 

Will wonders how discretely he can shove Hannibal through the door as his professor steps closer, brimming with not so implicit curiosity. He’s like a man watching a show, wide-eyed and chewing a breakfast pastry. 

“Yeah. Perfect.”

His professor nods enthusiastically, dipping his sweet into a cup. “Any major plans, then?”

“Santa Croce,” Will answers, and because his professor will inevitably ask, “...and a performance.”

“Well, that does sound exciting,” the man says, and now he’s looking only at Hannibal, the very obvious not-student of his in their exclusively-rented out hostel, shoulder to shoulder with _Mr. Graham_ , his features formed with the imperious allure of Grecian sculptures and covered in pitch-black, accentuating leather. 

“It is also not too late to find good produce at Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio,” Hannibal adds, because Hannibal, ever polite sophistication, always responds when addressed. Will’s learned that he also seems to savor provoking him. Knowing that doesn’t stop Will from squeezing his elbow just a little hard.

His professor’s eyes practically sparkle— Will doesn’t know if it’s because of Hannibal’s perfect accent or other associations— and he enthuses “ _Che meraviglia!”_ before breaking into such rapid Italian Will cannot keep up.

Hannibal, of course, is more than happy to. 

That’s when Will feels he’s entitled to start dragging the other man away. “We’ve got to go. _Arrivederci_ , _Professore_.”

Will has apparently not acted fast enough, because his professor dips the last bit of his pastry in his _caffe_ , nods and replies with a too wide smile, “ _Ciao, Signore Graham, Dotorre Lecter_.”

_Just great_.

Hannibal manages to reply, _“_ _alla prossima occasione, Professore_ ,” before Will hauls them all the way out to Hannibal’s motorcycle. As a matter of integrity, Will decides not to visibly inspect the mechanics of the Ducati even as he mentally deconstructs and reassembles each facet. Like its rider, it is all power, elegance and devastatingly dark lining.

“You’re not subtle, y’know.”

Hannibal climbs onto the bike and beckons Will. “ _Audentis Fortuna iuvat_ ,” he says.

_Fortune favors the bold_. Yup, for all his stateliness and serene cool, _Dotorre Lecter_ is not subtle one bit. Hannibal radiates vindication as Will proceeds to wrap his arms around him from the back of the seat.

Gulping down the rest of the _cappuccino,_ Will resists wincing at the tenderness of Hannibal’s slow healing bite. 

The other man is this simultaneity, delivering equal parts pleasure and pain. And Will? Right now, clasped firmly around Hannibal’s body and feeling the air rush around them, Will and Hannibal are blurring, enactor and reveler, reveler and enactor in each other’s suffering and exaltation. 

At this speed and proximity to Hannibal, Will’s not even sure if they’re going so much sideways as up and down, wind-wrapped and hurtling from a cliff’s edge.

Hannibal parks his bike, and he and Will walk into the crowded market. Will’s only too happy when vendors advertise produce in his price range. He wonders if some exhilaration has carried over from their ride: he can’t help but fondly observe Hannibal being completely in his element. He charms sellers for the best fruit, scenting their peels and handling them for ripeness. He fills bags with pomegranates and lemons and vegetables and herbs and makes none of it seem heavy at all, even though Will’s finding the added weight a little substantial. At another stand, he haggles with a butcher and appreciates a couple pounds of meat rolled in parchment and tied with twine. Food really is important to this man, Will thinks, as Hannibal emanates unadulterated satisfaction.

“Anything special?” Will says, referring to the quality of the purchase. Hannibal looks—for Hannibal, anyway—momentarily thrown off.

A brief but detectable pause. Then, “Why do you ask?” 

“I don’t know. You just look happy.” Really happy, for all of Hannibal’s imperturbability. Will doesn’t mind the usual equanimity or this present display of more obvious emotion. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” Hannibal seems to consider as they stroll with arms full of produce. “Someone asked me that same question earlier this week.”

Will shrugs. “You had a good week.” He’s glad one of them did.

Hannibal almost shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I hardly remember it.”

Now _that_ feeling is more understandable to Will. “You missed me,” Will teases as he bumps against Hannibal while they walk.

Hannibal looks curious though. “Yes, I suppose so. I _did_ miss you.” He seems contemplative. “I am used to being alone. But not to being lonely.”

If only it could be illegal to say something like that while looking so perfectly domestic, buried in bags and bags of groceries that Will knows Hannibal is going to prepare for _him_. Will’s throat is dry, and swallowing, his bruise throbs. 

_Me too._

Will jumps at the sound of a crash.

_XIV. Fortuna/Fortune_. Hannibal.

The confluences of piercing sound pull Hannibal out of thoughts that, while he tries to observe them from some remove, are becoming increasingly… destabilizing. This is new. 

Hannibal is not _lonely_. His detachment from others arises from a nature so singular that none can understand it, even as they admire or begrudge the grandiosity he projects. While Hannibal finds company to be a pleasant distraction in the best of circumstances, society a game he excels at playing, he’s never longed for a companion, simply because he occupies himself entirely. All his life’s experiences and relationships have shown him that there can be no equal, someone to challenge him, someone to _change_ him.

And he’s always accepted that with grace, maybe even some vanity.

The sudden screech of rubber on stone lingers in Hannibal’s ears, as well as a high, tortured whimper. A motorist is picking himself up from the cobblestone, cursing at his upturned scooter. A stray dog has been thrown by the force of their collision a couple feet away. 

Trembling and whining, the dog tries to pick itself up, but its leg juts out at an angle. The scruffy thing whines. Its fur is damp and blood oozes out from beneath its quivering belly.

Grabbing his scooter, the cyclist _spits_.

Hannibal feels a flurry of movement at his side, and in a second, Will is on his knees by the dog, running a gentle hand down its back. He’s not, Hannibal thinks, unlike the stray at that moment. All dark hair, shining eyes, moving fear, and gentle, _such gentle_ , wounded sympathy. He empathizes with the creature entirely, more soft and frayed than Hannibal’s ever seen him.

And then, the air shifts. Will is not weightless hands, soothing murmurs. Turning toward the disgruntled motorist, Hannibal could almost imagine that Will is mirroring the perpetrator’s hot temper.

But no. Will’s not doing that. Will, with all his empathy, could never do something as prosaic as mimic the indignation of the average _swine_. Never, Hannibal thinks now. The dark of Will’s face is delectable. Rich and sinuous. It trickles like ink down his body, bold strokes and fractured pressure that carves the predatory rise of his shoulders, the combative readiness of his hands, the agile bend of his knees. And all these features are thrown into pitch-black contrast with his incandescent _rage_.

“Ever look where you’re going, asshole?” Will says, and the syllables are little more than serrated roughness. 

Hannibal gets the sense that the motorist does not recognize all of Will’s language. Still, he would have to be insensate not to apprehend some of Will’s present rapture. No longer content with cursing and spitting at the dog, the motorist redirects his vitriol at its protector. While Hannibal can easily envision such a confrontation lapsing into crude theatrics, the greater the cyclist’s bellows and flailing, the more Will withdraws into a kind of meditative contempt. Language no barrier, Will reads the bombastic body language, picks up cues in clothing and possessions, and discerns the nature of the man’s utterances by peering only as he can into his mind. He lances his responses into his foe like hooks. 

He doesn’t, Hannibal realizes, regard the cyclist as _human_. No: he’s the fish. And Will is the patient fisherman, coaxing his catch into biting something bright and harmless before Will hauls the creature out into the open to flounder and gape and suffocate. For all his boorishness, the motorist senses this, feels this. Laid bare— Hannibal is reminded of the phrase _under the eye of God,_ a challenge to which he has always risen— Will cuts pieces of his catch. Because, yes, the other is physically diminishing, more and more of him falling away under the blade of Will’s comprehension. Unmaking. 

Hannibal tears himself away from the sight. 

Placing their food at a safe distance, he obliges himself to examine the creature Will guards with such passion. 

The thing appears to have been hit at a considerable speed. The dark fur hides the exact nature and scope of its wounds. Hannibal suspects the stray’s condition was already poor before this encounter. It is mangy and malodorous. The thing’s leg is also broken, though again the extent of the damage is unclear. Its breathing is fiercely shallow.

“It’ll be okay.”

Hannibal finds that Will is now leaning over him, having discarded the useless remnants of his catch. His violent energy is transformed, no less all-consumingly, into attention toward the stray. The anger in Will’s eyes is now brightened with sadness, as if he too has been wounded. But not ever by something as weak and inferior as the thing that had run into the mutt. Will’s pain and vulnerability derives from the suffering animal. With no fear of contamination, Will sinks his hand into the dog’s fur, repeating in low tones, “it’ll be okay.” He doesn’t mind when his hand finds the wound, all pale and bloodiness, all light and dark. 

“I don’t have any of my tools,” Hannibal says to Will. Taking a last look at the pitiful creature, he rises leisurely and brushes the dirt off his knees. Then, he begins to walk away.

At first, Will just looks at him. Crouched tightly over the mutt, he is even more wide-eyed. One might characterize his countenance as dazed, nonplussed. And then it morphs into sheer, dark, light, gleaming bright _murderousness_.

Hannibal cannot describe the thrill that courses through his entire body. He doesn’t want to, not to announce it with words, only meet it with resounding and equally devout action. 

But he doesn’t. Resuming his course, he transfers the intensity of the feeling to procedure, asking a vendor for a first aid kit. He is halfway through the market when one confused seller finally rewards his inquiries.

As Hannibal walks back with a box of supplies, Will’s face changes. Now, he views the other man with wonder, even if the ghost of something more destructively charged, possibly suspicion, hasn’t completely disappeared. 

Hannibal is no veterinarian, but he does not fool himself into thinking he is incapable of administering care to the wounds. Pulling back the stray’s hair and probing its damaged flesh, he is able to staunch the bleeding. He develops a loose but secure sling for the lower half of the body. Carefully, he lifts the thing, his transformed stray, into his arms. It is all trembling, wild, agonized flesh. As Hannibal presses the mutt’s face to his chest, exposing it to his steady heartbeat, the creature seems to ease.

Will just stares at him.

“I won’t be able to transport it,” Hannibal tells Will and then heads back in the direction of the market. 

The sellers and buyers don’t take kindly to a man hauling a bleeding stray so near. He is able to convince (well, mostly bribe) one station into using their van to bring it to a vet, and though they don’t enjoy the mutt’s apparent pain, they appear mostly unconcerned, resigned to whatever may happen to the creature. 

Even if the language is beyond him, Hannibal senses that Will knows this. He _sees_ the sheep’s cavalier attitudes toward the stray’s demise, because to them, this creature is unfortunate but also insignificant. No one else interceded during the dog’s injury. They might even enjoy the effects of its death, because their customers won’t be distracted, and they will no longer be bothered for scraps. 

And Will, seeing these ugly impulses, is loveliness itself, not in its purity but in its unrivaled contamination.

“ _Grazi_ ,” Hannibal tells them, and he begins to lead Will away. 

Will is quiet at Hannibal’s side.

“The wounds did not appear too deep, Will,” Hannibal says. “Likely the dog will receive stitches. It is important that infection is prevented. It will need an examination of its leg and femur as well.”

Hannibal does not even have to ask when Will retrieves their groceries by himself, seeing the state of the doctor’s dress. The jacket is glossy with blood, even if Hannibal’s hands are now cleaned of it. 

“Yeah, well, strays are scrappy,” Will says. “That one’s probably seen better days, though not by much.”

“You are close to animals,” is the observation Hannibal chooses to communicate.

Will laughs hauntedly. “Mutts are simple. If you treat a dog well, it’ll treat you well back. They might have their different personalities, but they respond to care with loyalty. Strays, too, even though they have reasons _why_ they’re wary.”

Yes, Will has observed those reasons so clearly today, and responded to them, however _incompletely_. 

“I hope for your sake, though, that one wasn’t too badly off,” Will confesses as both thanks and concern, gesturing to the grisly aftermath of Hannibal’s administrations.

Hannibal shifts, trying to give the appearance of being uncomfortable covered in blood. “It did not smell diseased,” he responds to Will’s implications.

“‘Smell diseased?’” Will repeats incredulously. 

“I have been able to scent disease before. During my training in France, my detection of cancer in patients afforded early treatment and recovery.”

“You can smell cancer.” Will blinks. “Jesus Christ, Hannibal. That’s enough impressive feats from you today.”

“But, Will,” Hannibal answers once they’ve returned to the motorcycle, “the day has only just begun.”

_And your behaviors have already rendered me equally...impressed._

Most people, Hannibal thinks, would be hesitant if not entirely unwilling to wrap their arms around a man covered in blood. As Will seats himself behind Hannibal, there is no hesitation. His hands link low over Hannibal’s abdomen and he presses his palms against the sticky, crimson wetness. 

As they drive on, Will even relaxes his head on Hannibal’s shoulder. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.


	8. Stray/Palace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi All!
> 
> A belated part 2 of the weekend's updates. Thank you for your lovely comments, and I hope to respond to them soon!
> 
> Please take care, and I appreciate you reading and sharing your thoughts!

_XV. Stray/Vagante_. Will.

Hannibal’s apartment is not what Will has been expecting. It’s grand, sure— what residential palace wouldn’t be? — but the splendor and monumentality emerges from what could have easily been ruins. Not that there’s a sense of that now. The building stretches long across the riverfront, basking under the Florentine sun and turning it to rust. Granite slabs pebbled like molars embellish the entryway, greeting guests with a Gothic grin. Will feels the many windows on him, blue-blind and unilateral, and he does not escape their scope once he enters the building. He only becomes part of their history. 

There’s no dust, no gossamer cobwebs, so why does Will feel like he’s becoming entombed? No, that’s not it— he’s calm, not like a man entering a crypt. But something around him is building up. Something about him is falling apart.

It’s while Will is walking in Hannibal’s shadow that his eyes fall upon a fresco and he recognizes what’s been shifting under his skin since they left the market-place (he could ignore it somewhat as they rode and he held fast to Hannibal’s body). It’s the same as the Uffizi gallery. Overhanging paint on plaster depicts winged figures, and Will supposes they ought to be cherubs. But that’s not what he sees. The feathers darken in his vision like raven wings. He can almost hear them beating, hear the shrill caw. 

_Stop it—_

Will tries to move past it, push it out of his mind, but he’s stopped by a sculpted lion sitting at the foot of the stairs, porphyry eyes blank. Except, it’s not a lion anymore. The animal shrugs its original form off like an ill-fitting coat. The features twist and sprout where there should be no muscle or bone. And, in a second, Will is face-to-face with what appears to be a stag. Though it isn’t. It’s… not right: too blackened, too chimeric, too grotesque. 

It reaches out to Will, antlers obscured enough to be taken either as a weapon or a deformed hand. 

“Will?”

Hannibal is at the height of the stairs, waiting. Will feels a little embarrassment through his daze. When he looks up, he expects to see the other man’s usual polite curiosity. But that’s not how Hannibal appears. Will pauses on the steps. Hannibal’s watching in the same manner as he had when Will was ill and mad over the _Primavera_ , or when he’d been in the grips of anger and disgust over what happened to the stray. His gaze hovers on some treacherous edge: between playful and profound. Between carefulness and wild abandon. 

“It’s not too far.” 

Hannibal’s room is on the upper-most floor. The quarters are capacious, furniture covered in vermillion velvet, and a terrace looks out onto the riverfront.

Will follows Hannibal into a kitchen that gleams with implements and spices Will cannot name. His fridge, of course, is gargantuan, and easily holds all their purchases.

Though Will’s not focused on that or any of it. 

He _can’t_ focus.

“The staff is polite,” Will murmurs for the sake of saying something, however badly murmured and badly benign. “Barely reacted to you coming in covered in blood.” The other fancy guests, meanwhile, ogled and inched away as far as they could within the limits of _polite_ conduct. “Hope that’s not a common occurrence.”

“I hope not.” Hannibal takes off his jacket. “I try to leave all blood-covered attire in the operating theatre. You have blood on your clothes, too.”

Hannibal’s right: Will’s pale shirt is streaked with drying auburn, and his arms are covered in fresh, vibrant red. It’s not too easy to see on his slacks, but Will can still feel the stiffness of dried blood on his thighs. Well, that helps explain the staring. What a sight the two of them must have made.

But Will was too distracted by hallucinations to notice.

“Christ,” he murmurs.

Hannibal beckons Will up the stairs and into his bedroom. He pulls open the solid mahogany of a dresser and passes Will a neatly folded stack of lighter and darker blue. The fabric is soft.

“Thanks,” Will mutters. He’s trying to focus on anything other than the immense, perfectly-made bed, so he bores holes into the other man’s back— which really isn’t helping, given the muscles rippling under his clothes.

Will struggles to pop a button from his shirt.

“You’re shaking,” Hannibal observes.

Will’s surprised and not surprised. “The adrenaline, I guess.” He laughs nervously. “I hope that stray’s alright.”

“I haven’t attended to dogs, so I can’t be certain,” says Hannibal. “That motorist hit it with some force.”

“ _That motorist_ can go to hell,” Will seethes in a generous summation of his feelings toward the man. His fingers are jerking more violently, almost clawing into his shirt.

Hannibal intercedes. With his deft hands that had not long ago pushed into the stray’s body, knowing its wounds to hasten or delay its mortality, Hannibal now precisely undoes Will’s buttons, going down one by one.

Because, unlike Will, Hannibal’s not the type of person to simply dispose of dirty laundry in a crumpled heap, he carefully folds the bloody garment. Then, he flaps open the pale blue dress shirt, holding it up against Will’s torso. When Will just stands there in confusion, Hannibal says, “raise your arms.”

“Really, Hannibal?” Will lifts an eyebrow.

“I’d hate for you to lose a button,” the other man says, and Will submits since it is the other man’s shirt he’s graciously borrowing. Or, it should be, but as Hannibal proceeds to button up the silky, robin shell-blue, it hugs all of Will’s definition far too intimately.

“You didn’t.”

Hannibal makes a show of smoothing a wrinkle in the fabric over Will’s chest, but his hand lingers too long in appreciation of his work. “I have no idea what you mean, Will.”

“You’re telling me that before Monday you had this in your dresser? How did you even get my measurements? No, wait—” Will says when Hannibal opens his mouth to respond. “And how did you think you could convince me to accept this?”

“I admit, my plans were not concrete,” and then Hannibal looks at him in supplication, “though now, I hope the events of this afternoon may change your original reservations.”

“Damnit,” Will says, because of course Hannibal’s right, but it all feels so unequal. To merit Will tolerating his no doubt expensive purchase of dress clothes, Hannibal worked to save the life of a stray dog, which he also obviously did for Will.

The last few hours are leaving him feeling unmoored. “I…I don’t know why you’re doing all this for me. _Everything_ ,” Will admits. “It’s too much. I can’t even begin to fathom it.”

Hannibal takes Will’s chin and stills his trembling— since when did he start shaking again? Lips brushing gently against Will’s, Hannibal says, “Try, Will.”

Will keeps his eyes closed, shuddering, gasping. The cliff feels so close now, the plunge inchoate. “You’re… not like anyone else I’ve ever met. No one sees me, and knows, and chooses me in what I am. They don’t _understand_. You’re…not like me, but you are, I think. Somehow. I don’t know how. I’m afraid to find out, even though I… I want to. I didn’t think there could be anyone else. Now that I know, I’m not sure if I can stand it.”

In the dark, Will feels Hannibal’s lips against Will’s own, his breath hot in Will’s mouth. Will moves his lips blindly against the sensation of Hannibal, and it’s slick and searing.

“Are you speaking about me, or you, Will?”

“I don’t know,” Will says, gulping hard. The bruise stings. “I don’t know…” Will still keeps his eyes screwed shut as he wraps his arms around Hannibal’s shoulders, kissing him more ravenously, sucking the scorching shadow that is the inside of the other man’s mouth. He doesn’t want to release it, just raise the temperature between them higher and higher until they’re at the boiling point and their physical forms disperse into vapor and atoms, entangling.

“I barely know you,” Will gasps at the intensity of his own feelings, of Hannibal’s. He’s grabbing beneath the shadow and bursts of light in his eyelids at Hannibal’s shirt, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hold. “I don’t know how I can want you so badly.”

Hannibal’s mouth is smooth, endless dark, and Will is moaning, practically sobbing into it. He’s untethered, coming undone. In his dizzying lack of sight, Will feels Hannibal walk him back so that his knees hit the edge of Hannibal’s bed. Will falls onto his back on the covers, and he’s trapped under Hannibal’s weight and ardor.

“I barely know you…but I do. I do,” Will babbles. Hannibal’s mouth sinks into the tender bruise, and Will shouts, his head snapping back against the mattress, and his eyes fly open into white light.

“Are you speaking about me,” Hannibal says, his voice rough and low, and he presses the blade of his teeth into the soft purple patch of skin. Will moans, his fingers tight on Hannibal’s forearm and bicep. “Or you?”

“I don’t know,” Will says. Hannibal raises himself on his elbows so he hovers above Will, and he looks so large, enveloping Will entirely. Will arches his neck up and kisses Hannibal’s chin, nibbling his jawline. Openmouthed, he drags his teeth all the way down the column of Hannibal’s neck. He sweeps his tongue into the dip in his clavicle, where he can taste the brine, sea-water punishing, of Hannibal’s sweat. Will’s lips are a perfect circle when he begins to kiss the spot, first lightly, and then he raises the force of his suction, feeling the rigidity of the skin tighten and swell… and then give, give, give. Blood is surging beneath the thin epidermis, Will can feel it, but he doesn’t rush the push of his teeth. No, the way he applies them is so methodical it’s almost meditative, as if there were no pain involved entirely, just heightened sensation, constant pressure.

Hannibal is groaning on top of him, the cradle of his hips dropped low onto Will’s. Will feels his heat and his hardness. Both of theirs.

“I missed you,” Will pants, licking the hickey and feeling the indentations of his own teeth-marks on the underside of his tongue. “I’ve been alone, but I wasn’t lonely. Not before you.” He’s raising up one knee, and then he’s slowly, falteringly rolling his hips so that there’s a flare of sudden, incredible friction between Hannibal and Will’s erections. Will gasps loudly, and Hannibal grinds down hard against him, and Will’s voice just doesn’t stop. 

Hannibal keeps repeating Will’s name, and the heat keeps rising, so much that Will doesn’t even feel the relief of air on his naked body once Hannibal divests him of his clothes. They’re moving hard on the mattress now, back and forth, and Will pulls Hannibal’s sweater over his head, moaning and sighing as his somewhat shaking fingers undo Hannibal’s belt and the fly of his pants. With forceful swiftness, Hannibal tears himself free of his trousers and then drops onto Will again so that every shared point of contact between their skins is fire.

“Please,” Will gasps, holding Hannibal’s face, breathing hard in between open-mouthed kisses. “I need you.”

Hannibal nips Will’s lips. “I need you. Will.”

“I know,” Will sighs as their bodies rock aggressively against each other, heat and slick and friction. “I _know_. I need you, too.”

Hannibal extends his body over Will’s, every muscle of his torso apparent as he stretches toward his nightstand. He spills odorless, transparent lotion onto his fingers, smoothing it, before his arm is between Will’s legs—

Will’s crying out Hannibal’s name, his voice more broken then he’s ever heard it. He feels fractured, entirely shattered, Hannibal’s fingers searching inside him, pushing and twisting and curling and pressing. Every motion ignites the fissures in his body. Will’s voice is an unending, low, high, uneven noise. He can feel the rounded points of Hannibal’s knuckles, the defined edges of the joints in each firm, flexing finger.

“I need,” Will repeats, even as a sudden twist and a flash of white-bright fire seeks to undo him, “I need—”

“Yes, Will,” Hannibal says. “I know.”

And then Hannibal is inside him, and Will knows no more.

He’s stopped breathing entirely, mouth open in a voiceless scream, and his feet are digging into the mattress. Is it Hannibal or Will who lifts Will’s hips into each thrust, faster and more brutal than the last? Will doesn’t know, because all he feels is that Hannibal is moving forward into him, and he’s moving back into Hannibal, and only wild, flagrant desire is capable of flaring into being in the decreasing space between them. Soon, there is no room between their bodies, only sliding, sweaty skin, roaming hands, licking and sucking mouths. Will’s fingers are tight in Hannibal’s hair as Hannibal raises Will’s thighs into his arms and forces himself in as far as he can go.

“Hannibal!” Will shouts, his eyes wide and on the ceiling as Hannibal finds every place within Will, carving new space where it didn’t exist. The stretch _aches_ because just as there’s space within Will, Hannibal moves to fill it, and when Hannibal angles into Will’s pleasure, the younger man sobs, struggling for breath. He desperately claws Hannibal’s back, trying hard to penetrate the other with his nails, to also pull and twist his most sensitive internal flesh. 

“Remarkable. So beautiful, Will.” Hannibal pants and grunts against his ear as Will’s body jolts against his relentless thrusts. “I could never expect you.”

Will gasps for air, and his legs are so tight around Hannibal’s waist that he’s not sure the other will ever be able to pry them loose again.

“I can’t—” he cries, trying to kiss Hannibal but failing with how tight and trembling his entire body is. He rocks against Hannibal, and Hannibal uses his hands to explore every feature taut and drawn like a bowstring with pleasure. Will won’t find release, he thinks, just falling apart. He doesn’t know how he can be remade after this, not without Hannibal’s fragments.

“Will, Will. Clever, dear Will,” Hannibal breathes against his mouth, all devotion to the consummation of Will’s desire. “Mine.” And then—

Will clutches Hannibal entirely, making no sound other than his release against Hannibal’s body. The pleasure tears through Will like fractures in china. His nerves are alight with it, splintering Will apart.

And Hannibal doesn’t stop moving against him, pushing him to fall apart just that much more. The throes of passion and pain are so intense now that Will thinks he might pass out, and his limbs aren’t entirely limp but they’re aching, flinching with Hannibal’s continued barrage of overwrought, all-encompassing sensation. Will cries out with oversensitivity, but he continues to weave his fingers into Hannibal’s hair, to lick into Hannibal’s savagely panting mouth, because he wants Hannibal equally undone. With as much strength as he can muster, Will raises his pelvis and draws his legs around the other, encouraging Hannibal deeper inside Will’s shattered remains.

“I know,” Will whispers against Hannibal raking over the jagged ruins of his old self. “I know,” Will says, biting Hannibal’s lip and tightening his whole body around him.

That’s when Hannibal lets out a sound, somewhere between a groan and a shout, that’s so rough and low it’s almost inhumane, and he floods Will’s welcoming, precarious body with heat.

_XVI. Palazzo/Palace._ Hannibal.

When Hannibal comes to waking, the light of the room has shifted to the honeyed gold of late afternoon. It ignites the chestnut and brandy hues in Will’s hair, tousled over his pillow.

Now, thinks Hannibal with perfect clarity, would be the opportunity to sketch the younger man. Will’s body is pliant with sleep, and while the dark covers contrast with Will’s pale skin, he’s still slightly flushed and bears the rosy marks of Hannibal’s mouth.

Though his fingers itch with the temptation to draw, Hannibal considers that it may be more prudent to begin preparing their pre-opera meal. Will hasn’t had anything to eat all day. Also, after their first coupling, they’d grabbed at each other and chased climax a second time and a third time before collapsing into bed in hunger-slaked exhaustion. Well, satisfying one type of hunger, that is— another far less carnal persists.

Hannibal resists passing his hand over Will’s naked body one more time, going below and entering the kitchen to begin his work.

Yes, Hannibal is happy that the stray’s blood hasn’t gotten on any of their produce.

The leaves of a black Tuscan palm— viridian, plum, mauve, and grass green—swirl in riveting concert from the center of the plant’s shadowy mass. Submerging the vegetable for alternating moments in boiling and ice-cold water, Hannibal twists the dark foliage free of the stem with his wrist. He’s satisfied hearing the snap as the fibers cleanly break.

At each stage of the process of cooking— scorching steaks over a bed of glowing embers, boiling beans in lightly salted broth, toasting diagonal slivers of crostini, and cutting meat into translucent ribbons of marbled flesh— Hannibal’s movements are meticulous, and he does not hurry. Time is no matter for proper preparation. 

Which is how Hannibal is considering his forthcoming maneuvers with Will.

He can feel it, the splitting seams in his person-suit when he and Will are together. It’s inevitable that soon his façade will crack open entirely, and Will will divine all of Hannibal. He must admit, the prospect of anybody penetrating his carefully crafted persona to scatter its constituent parts about, like the shards of a fallen _tea cup_ , is somewhat…objectionable. 

But Will is not anybody. He has a destructive impulse that filters through piercing prognostications, and in extraordinary circumstances, drives Will to physically hunt down his foes. He sees what other people cannot see. Will’s proven, in moments of affection and violence, that he is more than willing to destroy Hannibal, too, dismantling the other bit by bit.

Were Hannibal and Will to break each other, could their forms come back together? The tea cup, restored? No, not restored, Hannibal thinks— resurrected, repurposed in matter and design.

“I feel like we swapped appearances or something.”

Will pads barefoot into the kitchen in his cerulean dress shirt. The pearlescent buttons glint, and his midnight blue trousers are resplendent with the glimmers of pale pinstripes. Instead of donning the jacket, he’s slipped it in the crook of one elbow and rests his hands in his pockets. Will’s curls are darker than usual and pushed out of his face, wet and sleek— he’s taken a shower. Without asking Hannibal’s permission.

Hannibal couldn’t be happier.

Will also seems pleasantly surprised to observe Hannibal’s more casual state. At the grill he wears his red sweater with the sleeves rolled up, soft gray slacks, and a smock wrapped around his waist.

“There were very good raw materials,” Hannibal says about Will’s display.

“Try again.”

“You look very handsome, Will.”

“Just like you planned, Hannibal?” Will says, not asking.

“You give me too much credit, much as I’d like to take it.” Hannibal will admit that his fantasies cannot compare to the vision of Will in the flesh, dressed in morning sky and midnight blue finery. “You were already very impressive, and not even flannel and bad aftershave can lessen that.”

“You don’t like my aftershave?”

Hannibal is surprised— he hadn’t meant to reveal that. “Only that it smells like the contents of a bottle with a ship on the label.”

“Because that’s where it comes from,” Will scowls. “I guess I don’t need to apologize for using your shower then. I mean, you are the reason I had to.” Will searches the kitchen, cataloguing the unfamiliar items. “I can’t believe we fucked in the middle of the day.”

While Hannibal minds the flame beneath his charcoals, it is not entirely lost to him how Will’s ensemble reflects in striking light and shadow the young man’s striding form. Perceiving Will approach him, Hannibal moderates the fire, and Will, apparently watching the meat cook, leans into the side of Hannibal’s face to say, “you look good, too, by the way. And you smell _delicious_.”

Will is becoming more and more doubtlessly Hannibal’s undoing.

His hand slides away from Hannibal’s shoulder. “So, anything I can do to help?”

“You may set the table.” Hannibal refers to a cabinet. “Now that I’ve finally gotten you to wear it, I’d hate for your suit to be dirtied.”

Will raises his eyebrows, arranging plates and glasses. “You didn’t seem worried about that earlier.”

“Has anyone ever expressed that _you_ are a downright terror, William?”

“Well,” Will grins, “I don’t think anybody’s ever enjoyed it quite like you.”

“How fortunate that I reserve the singular honor,” Hannibal says earnestly.

Will laughs. “I feel the exact same way about you, _my_ _monster_.”

Hmm— now that is closer than he’d like Will to be, at the moment, to Hannibal’s Florentine personality.

“And here I’d hoped we might enjoy a civilized meal before the opera.” Hannibal fills the empty tablecloth with platter upon laden platter. “For _antipasti_ , we have _prosciutto crudo toscano_ _e_ _crostini di fegatini_ ; for _primi piatti_ , a hearty _ribollita e_ _penne alla cacciatora_ ; _piatti del mezzo_ is _zucchine ripiene_ ; and for _secondi piatti_ , there is _bistecca alla fiorentina e gamberi arrosto_.”

“You made a three course meal,” Will says in disbelief, already devouring with his eyes.

“Technically two courses, with _hors d’oeuvre_ and some intermediate dishes,” Hannibal says, and adds, “I was feeling very invigorated.”

“Our invigorating activities have left me famished.”

Hannibal seats himself across from Will. “I am glad to hear it,” he says, smiling broadly, and pours wine into his and Will’s glasses. “A good chef excites the appetite as much as he satiates it.”

Will tilts the liquid in his glass, watching it sparkle with scarlet. “And he always leaves his guests wanting _more_.”

_Yes._

Will doesn’t follow any particular order as he samples dishes from the first and second courses together. Bending low over his spoon, he slurps the soup and cleans the last clinging drops of broth from his utensil with his tongue. Only pausing to wipe away the crimson from his mouth, Will wolfs down the mushrooms, peppers, and pasta tossed with olive oil and tomato sauce. Though his velocity and thoroughness indicate an engaged appetite, the younger man takes his time with the thick cut of steak. The blade of his knife just punctures the blackened, crackling crust and gradually slices into an interior that is warm and red and soft. Juice pools beneath the cut of flesh onto Will’s plate. 

“ _Bistecca alla fiorentina,_ or Florentine style steak,” says Hannibal. “It is a popular dish. However, it is seasoned very simply. What makes it so dear to locals is that it’s cooked _al sangue_.”

“’To the blood,” Will translates. 

“Yes. Handle the meat too roughly before the time of consumption, and all the juices and flavor will flow out. The meat will be tasteless. How do you find it, Will?”

Will raises a chunk of meat to his lips and chews. “Perfectly prepared.”

Hannibal joins him in consuming the steak.

“So— why medicine?” Will asks. “You obviously would have no trouble opening your own restaurant. Or coffee shop. You must really want to be a doctor given how much you also enjoy preparing food.”

“Part of my interest in cooking is the same as why I am drawn to a medical practice. Both reveal something about human nature,” Hannibal responds.

“Human nature? That sounds more like a psychiatrist than a chef.”

“Food is as much intellectual as it is sensual. For example, presentation, or how people see their food greatly affects whether or not they desire to consume it. I find that people’s choices of cuisine reveal much about their upbringing, their personal values, and their cultural beliefs, maybe more so than any conversation will.”

“I s’pose that’s true,” Will admits and crunches into a slice of bread with liver pâté. “You might consider both life-sustaining activities, too. Medicine is about improving the quality of life, and so is food.”

“Yes.”

“After all, hunger is a type of pain that also demands treatment. It’s a powerful motivator of behavior. Starve a man,” Will says, “and you’ll see his true nature.”

Hannibal pushes the tines of his fork _deep_ into a slowly dwindling piece of flesh.

_Yes._

It is raw and ruby.

_Yes_.

Blood flows from the wounds.

_Yes_.

“It’s also about… the art of transformation.”

Will appears contemplative. His blue eyes flick from the reflective surface of his soup over to Hannibal. He continues, “You’re transforming the materials into something new… even ones that people wouldn’t want to eat, maybe touch. Not at first. It’s also a transformative experience for the person partaking.” Will swallows a mouthful of simmered beans and cabbage. “Who are they once the meal has ended?”

_Who are they indeed?_

“Now you are sounding like the student of psychiatry, Will.”

Will wrinkles his nose. “Psychology, _not_ psychiatry, thank god.”

“I thought you were of the classical persuasion.”

“No. Just for this trip.”

“Then you intend to be a psychologist? Given your understanding of the human mind, that’s not surprising.”

“Well, not exactly,” Will mutters. “I’m studying psychology and sociology, but my concentration is criminology.”

… _Oh_.

Ever remarkable, ever clever, ever _unpredictable_ Will.

“Then I suppose,” Hannibal says, his knife in one hand, fork in the other, “you must have a very apt understanding of the human mind. Those with only a superficial grasp of the psyche and its drives find it difficult to comprehend those who would depart from conventional morality and the masses.”

Will nods. The space between his eyes is still tight. He leers with a crooked grin. “You’d be surprised— sidestepping morality isn’t really all that _unfamiliar_ to the average person.”

“How so?”

Will gulps down his wine and brings the glass down soundly onto the table. “Take this afternoon. Society tells you very early on that it is wrong to take a life. Whose life, though? Mine? Yours? What about the _nuisance_ that gets in front of my scooter and damages my couple hundred dollar ride? It’s okay if something like that bleeds to death. It deserves to be punished. It’s already broken, anyway… it was just a matter of time. And me, every day _I_ suffer through that flea-ridden pest begging for scraps and scaring away my paying customers. I have a business to run. It’s _okay_ if it dies. It’ll be a mercy killing.” Will scoffs. “If the average person abides by morality,” he says, “it’s degree by fucking convenient degree.”

Hannibal feels full, and he knows it’s not the food.

His person-suit is practically bursting at the seams.

“Many people do not value non-human life as highly as they do the human. After all,” Hannibal gestures to the table, “we consume deer and cow and _pig_. Their lives and deaths are for none other than our own gratification. Dogs, though companionate, have often served a similar role— they hunt, they fight, and they guard the house from those who would wish the inhabitants harm, and they occasionally die for their services.” 

“It’s not just animals,” Will says. “Most of the time when people loosen their moral straightjackets, it’s because they want something from other people. What do they want? Well, sometimes it’s to cheat them; sometimes it’s to hurt them; sometimes it’s to steal their status or material wealth; sometimes it’s to rape and _reduce_ them. Very rarely do they want to understand them.”

“You are the rare exception.”

Will chuckles. “Well, sometimes I wish I wasn’t.”

“Is that not your goal, going into law enforcement? To apprehend the criminal, thereby protecting the virtuous and the innocent?”

“No, I…” Will licks his lips, and reaches across the table for the bottle of wine. Refilling his glass high with rouge, he throws back his head, inhaling the contents. He shakes out his dark curls, blinking bright. “Y’know, back at home, I always see mutts on the docks. They’re around, constantly, because they’re hungry for attention or food, and people keep them hanging on scraps before they abandon them there. I’ve always liked those dogs, because if you love a dog, it loves you back. Pure and simple. You don’t have to _look_ into them, not like with everybody else. Everybody else thinks: here’s some poor, broken boy. He has to be, that weirdo who’s plagued by nightmares and the invisible things in other people’s heads. His father works too hard and drinks too much, and his mother isn’t around. He has to be insane, because otherwise he _knows_ the things that you never wanted anyone else to know about you. About your teacher and your bus driver and your friend and your lover. _All_ the deep, dark things they’ve tried to hide. Sure, he’s smart enough to use when it’s convenient, and he might even be pretty enough to try and fuck. Don’t let that fool you, though. He’s no good. He’s unnerving, he’s crazy, and he’s unstable. He’s _dangerous_.”

_But isn’t he dangerous, Will?_

Will is glaring at some distant point, his shoulders stern. “I don’t know enough of the virtuous or the innocent, if they’re out there, somewhere. And I know too much about the ugly.” Will laughs. “Strange, isn’t it, then? My choice of occupation.”

“A more obvious choice might have been a veterinarian,” Hannibal says, and Will laughs so hard there are tears in his eyes. Hannibal hums. “We are not one-dimensional beings, Will. Often, our natures are far more contradictory. Though I chose the path of a doctor, I too have known those who would inflict harm on me, and I wished to revisit harm on them.”

“Those who killed your family.”

“Yes.” Hannibal sees them but he feels them most acutely: Will’s eyes, bright, shadowy, penetrating. “That was the most grievous offence”— and _his dear_ _one_ the most potent loss—“but there have also been others, with lesser slights. That being said, your reasons for going into criminology might be deceptively simple.”

“How’s that?”

“Doing bad things to bad people makes you feel good,” Hannibal observes.

Will drums his fingers noiselessly on the table. “Deceptively simple indeed. In that scenario, don’t I still take on the wicked to defend the weak?”

“Not quite,” Hannibal replies, folding his fingers together. “You do not hold good or bad to be constants. What you _see_ is vulnerability: an openness to the changes, however unwanted, that people bring onto each other. The transformations and the transgressions. Your empathy makes you vulnerable to others, and they in turn to you. You wish to retaliate against those who would exploit vulnerability to manipulate, to abuse, and to destroy.”

_As much as you may do the same_.

Hannibal personally has no such scruples. Vulnerability is a beautiful thing to him— such protean boundaries suggest something that has not yet come into its final form: the pupa in the chrysalis, the food in the making. So much better for Hannibal to intervene before civilization irreversibly molds and warps one’s true nature. Well, perhaps not so _irreversibly_. 

Hannibal’s proclivities might explain Will’s preternatural eagerness to wound Hannibal as much as to hold him.

“Doing bad things to bad people, huh?” Will says. 

Will’s observing some faraway thing again, and Hannibal wonders if he isn’t getting a little drunk. His posture is still too self-conscious, however, even if the firm line of his mouth has softened into something wondering. “Maybe…I don’t always mind probing into other people’s minds. Not always,” Will says. He’s looking out the terrace, where a fragment of Florence and its denizens are visible. “Hurting them,” Will says. He then directs his gaze sharply at the man across from him, and his eyes are reflecting the maroon of Hannibal’s, not unlike the swimming red of the wine, of the meat, and of the blood. “ _Changing_ _them_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.


	9. To The Blood/To Every Captive Soul and Gentle Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello,
> 
> My best wishes to everybody right now in the midst of pandemic. My apologies for the lull in updates in this fic-- my wifi has been suffering in my current location, and I've been struggling to keep up with this and my online teaching when I've got Internet capabilities. 
> 
> But I'm VERY happy to share the new chapters now, all three of them today and tomorrow!
> 
> Your comments, views, and kudos have been so lovely. I hope that this fic helps distract people a little from their worries.
> 
> Thank you again, and I'll be in touch with more soon.

_XVII. Al sangue/To the blood_. Will.

Will doesn’t think he’s ever known anybody like Hannibal.

Or that he’s been known by anybody like Hannibal knows him. Because he sees, Hannibal does know Will on some disarmingly intimate level. The cognitive and physical aspects of Will, the plain and the invisible. He can sense the tenderness and the righteous anger. And with Hannibal, Will maybe knows himself better than when he’s been alone or lost in the maddening crowd. 

It’s all he’s ever wanted _and_ feared.

Will emphatically lowers his glass of wine down to the table, trying to keep still in his armchair. No more alcohol for him tonight. Even though he’s really craving a whiskey. 

And, of course, because Hannibal’s armchairs have fantastic upholstery, Will doesn’t feel like offending his host with spots of wine. Despite the furniture’s red velvet. Will thinks he’s done a good amount of prodding Hannibal’s seemingly impregnable complacency already.

Will sensed undercurrents of feelings that surprised him as they spoke over their meal. They were subtle but unmistakable, like the complex overlay of spices and aromas he’d absorbed from Hannibal’s cooking, but Will supposes these other takeaways were less intentional. Warm delight, sizzling irritation, blazing enrapture. And some combination of feeling— soft and hard and bitter and _sweet_. It shocked Will, and he’d wanted to hold the precious, multi-nuanced thing on his tongue, to pry more of it from the other man’s shell, and then let no one else ever get a taste.

He doesn’t think Hannibal’s been known by anybody quite like he’s known by Will.

Of maybe he’s flattering himself, post he-can’t-remember-how-many glasses of wine.

He doesn’t know if he’ll manage to stay awake during the opera.

“I hope that is the sound of a full belly and not an anxious mind,” Hannibal answers to Will’s groan, because, as they’ve already established, he knows Will frighteningly well. 

“We’ll see…” Will starts saying, and then he trails off as Hannibal re-enters the room.

Having changed out of his sweater and knitted slacks, Hannibal is now wearing a double-breasted, coal-black suit. The lowest of his six silver-gold buttons holds his jacket loosely together so that the oxblood shirt dramatically carves out the rise and fall of his chest. His cuff pins gleam around his wrists, along with a single cream-colored pocket square, the sharp point of which cuts only somewhat into the black and red that flows over Hannibal’s body. 

Will’s on his feet and has his arms around Hannibal’s hips very quickly. 

“This is not fair.” Because that’s definitely on Will’s mind, though it’s not his first thought. “At least now I might not fall asleep during the show. I take it the motorcycle jacket is out of commission.”

“Sadly, yes,” Hannibal says, and Will gets the distinct impression that he is refraining from mussing up the other man’s tamed waves. “I even had my tailor construct my present ensemble to pair with it.”

“Really? I thought this was kinda edgy.”

Hannibal only smiles, all too aware of Will’s satisfaction. 

“It should go well with Dante, at least,” Will says as if to mollify. He doesn’t need to.

Sans vehicle, Will and Hannibal arrive at the grounds of Santa Croce as the lavenders and amethysts of the evening atmosphere are just beginning to deepen. Torches flicker, branding patches of grass and stone wall. The facade of the Pazzi Chapel has been masked so that the courtyard is transported into an otherworld, diaphanous veils swaying, columns lifting into the darkening heavens and the pathway of the stage lit with the most powerful illumination. 

“I hope this isn’t meant to be a social occasion,” Will says, because there are far too many people here already for his liking. They swirl as specters in black and pearls, sipping white wine. Shrill laughter and jovial flapping peels into the air, where Will was hoping he wouldn’t choke on perfume and pride and excess. 

“I haven’t had the opportunity to cultivate extensive networks in Florence, though they have their perks.”

“Meaning?”

“Amusement, Will.”

“Isn’t that why we’re here?”

Hannibal almost looks offended. “Operatic music that falls so short of ecstasy it only _amuses_ is something I take care to cull from my life.”

“Do your operatic social circles realize the music’s your main course, and they’re just the appetizers?” 

Hannibal’s smile is all teeth. “Good appetizers are very important in a feast. I don’t think our enjoyment will be lessened without too much socializing, in this instance.”

“I know mine won’t,” Will says. He’d really rather avoid it. “Wait— ‘too much’?” 

That’s when Will realizes Hannibal’s and his definitions of non-extensive social networks vary drastically. It’s not even one by one: pairs and ostensible groups of people stream over to the doctor, hailing him in fluent Italian. They’re painted smiles, lowered lashes, puffed chests, expensive fabric, glistening jewelry, and fidgeting limbs. 

Gravitating closer and closer toward Hannibal’s magisterial aura, these onlookers are pilgrims trekking the long and tortuous path to a reliquary. Touching the bones of the saint, they hope, will instill them with power, transfigure their profanity into the sacred. It is a comfort against the dread of death and putative measures taken against the unfaithful that follow them into the afterlife. They try to disguise it, but Will can read that they’re hungry and longing and fearful for Hannibal.

To Hannibal, though, they’re all just _amusing_.

And personally, Will thinks his prayers would feel constricted by the saints.

Will feels their stares latch onto him. 

And then there is the surge— envy, desire, consternation, anger, condescension, disregard, fascination, vilination—

Their enunciations are serpentine, choppy, foreign, and completely apparent to Will despite his lack of language. 

“I’m going to get a drink,” Will says before he pulls away from Hannibal. 

Will finally tracks down some waiter with a platter of glasses, and aware that he’s already a bit tipsy, he lets the wine flow down his throat anyway. 

“ _Mi scusi, Signore_.”

Fuck. 

“ _Non parlo Italiano_ ,” Will says through gritted teeth and sips his drink. 

“Ah, well, sir,” the man says with a strong accent, because, despite how teachers and guidebooks hit you over the head with the incontrovertible fact that you need to know Italian in _Italy,_ everybody Will encounters speaks English, “excuse me for bothering you.” 

“It’s no bother,” Will lies. 

He sees this man will not be dissuaded from speaking to Will. He dresses far simpler than the other opera goers: a worn, dark jacket rests over his weary shoulders, and his collar is just a little out of place. This man is in the middle of a search, and somehow _something_ about that has put Will in his path.

“A beautiful opera,” the man surmises in a gruff, lilting voice. 

“Attending and appreciating an opera requires a certain type of person. Are you that type of person, _Signore_?” Will asks. He knows this man is not— he’s too rough around the edges, too inelegant. 

“Chief Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi,” the other says, introducing himself. “ _Questura di Firenze_.”

Will’s eyes widen. “Police,” he says. That was not what Will was expecting, and a chief investigator at that.

“ _Si_.”

“Pazzi,” Will muses. “Like the chapel.”

The man nods again, but pride has changed into something more tangled.

“The Pazzi family commissioned this chapel from famed architect Filippo Brunelleschi in the fifteenth century,” Will says, reading into the other man’s recalcitrance and embedding that with historical knowledge. “But they never got to use it. During the so-called Pazzi Conspiracy, Francesco Pazzi assassinated members of the Medici family. He tried to dethrone Lorenzo the Magnificent, but he didn’t succeed. He killed his brother, Giuliano Medici, though, with over ten stab wounds to the head. For his crimes against the dynasty, Francesco was executed by hanging— a rather… public display of what happens to those who try and grab power from the eminent. The chapel is what remains of the Pazzi legacy,” Will raises his eyebrow, “and apparently its descendants.”

“You understand very well the history of the Florentine government,” Pazzi says in an attempt to regain his composure— he has the self-restraint and certitude of a police inspector, that’s for sure— but Will can tell that he’s been somewhat thrown off.

Will shrugs. “I guess you’re not entirely out of place here, then, are you, Inspector?”

“And you, _Signore_?” Pazzi says. “You do not appear to be very comfortable in Santa Croce.”

“Opera isn’t really my thing,” Will says, and while that would irritate the common opera goer, he suspects Pazzi won’t take offence. 

“You have company who enjoys it then,” Pazzi deduces.

“Something like that.”

“They appear to have left you high and dry, as they say.”

Will lifts his glass. “Not entirely.”

Pazzi laughs, his voice little more than chipped stone and sand. “I am not a man who enjoys the opera either. Too much tragedy. I am here because of my wife. But she has also left me high and dry.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s okay. Now I have like-minded company,” Pazzi says genially.

“You sensed a compatriot in the loner hiding beneath the columns,” Will deadpans and Pazzi smiles. 

“Or maybe I saw a man who needed saving from his surroundings,” the inspector says. “That’s part of my work. I save people, and I stop the monsters.”

“It sounded like you were here for personal reasons, not professional ones.”

“Right now, neither seems pleasurable. Though my wife doesn’t know that,” says Pazzi.

“My companion _does_ ,” Will says.

Pazzi smiles with a glint of dark, like he’s gleaned a precious morsel of knowledge from Will. He _is_ sharp. Will hasn’t gone toe-to-toe with chief inspectors before. 

“You are an American, Mr…?”

“Graham,” Will reluctantly answers. “Will Graham.”

“ _Signore Graham_ ,” Pazzi says, and Will realizes that the inspector had switched to the English title to coax a name from the younger man. “Have you been for long in Florence?”

“No,” Will says, bothered that Pazzi has induced personal information from Will so skillfully.

“You are an exchange student, then?”

“Yes.”

“For your sake, I hope your present company shows you some of the other parts of Florence that don’t involve the opera,” Pazzi remarks affably.

“You’re assuming that my present company is from here.”

“Or they know Florence well. American students don’t find events like this on their own.”

“You find it hard to turn off your investigative instincts, Inspector,” Will says, but he knows that’s not true, not exactly— this man is very intentional wheedling things from Will.

That, or he has some pre-existing information. 

“You do too, _Signore_ Graham,” Pazzi remarks. “Not very many people from Florence know the history of my family so well, or can call the exact details from memory. We both have the gift of imagination. Those moments when the connection is made, _that_ is my _keenest pleasure_.”

Yes, Inspector Pazzi is not a man easily dissuaded. He is steadfast in his pursuit of knowledge, sees his insights and epiphanies as triumphs, and though his methods are rough, he still cuts to the quick. 

“Knowing,” Will reads.

The inspector’s eyes light up. “Not thinking, not feeling: knowing. Success comes as a result of inspiration. Revelation is the development of an image, first blurred, then coming clearer.”

Will thinks of Hannibal’s graphite drawing. “You sound like an artist. What starts out as formless tone and random marks eventually becomes a detailed image. A work of art. The artist sketches out harmony from chaos, and then they create new chaos for new harmony, day after day.”

At that moment, Will feels something alter in Pazzi. A connection has been made. “You are a man who knows too, aren’t you, _Signore_ Graham?”

“There is a great deal to know,” Will observes, a little unnerved. “Or do you mean about the operatic arts specifically?”

“I do not know much about this opera,” Pazzi concedes, and then, shifting ever so slightly, says, “though I have been looking at a lot of paintings lately. Maybe too much. Especially Botticelli’s work.”

Now that is coincidental, Will thinks. So it’s probably _not_ a coincidence. Did this man come over to Will because he recognized him from the Uffizi?

“You don’t strike me as the type for visual art, either, Inspector. Does your wife like paintings, too,” asks Will, “or are you working on a case?”

“Ah, _Signore Pazzi_.”

Hannibal’s hand falls onto Will’s shoulder. 

Pazzi’s face does not register surprise, only a similar searching quality as when he’d begun speaking with Will. But that doesn’t make sense, because apparently Hannibal knows this man enough to call him by name. Did they plan to see each other here? 

Then, emotions flits through Pazzi’s stony demeanor that he can’t regulate quickly enough: recognition and...anxiety? Fear?

“I’ve had the pleasure to meet your lovely wife,” Hannibal says, referring to the dark-haired beauty on his other arm. 

Pazzi reaches out toward his wife— but apparently it’s with nervous or unhappy energy, because his wife’s face betrays concern and amusement. Her husband is jealous, she thinks. She puts her fingers in her husband’s elbow. 

“ _Dotorre Lecter_ ,” Pazzi says, regaining his calm. “A pleasure to see you again.”

“And a surprise,” says Hannibal. “I see that you are adding opera to your list of cultural past-times. No doubt with the influence of the enchanting _Signora Allegra Pazzi._ ”

“Good evening,” Allegra Pazzi says in accented English to Will. 

“Good evening,” Will answers.

“Do you know each other, too?” the woman asks her husband. 

“ _Signore_ Graham and I were just getting acquainted.”

“How fortunate indeed that we should know each other’s companions,” Hannibal says, placing his hand on Will’s waist and easing the other man against him. Allegra Pazzi understands Hannibal’s insinuations. Pazzi’s expression is harder to read. 

“ _Dotorre_ Lecter and I were just talking about the _libretto_ ,” Allegra says, referring to a cream pamphlet. “It’s very beautiful, the first sonnet of _La Vita Nuova_.” Allegra articulates to the slow rhythm of the stanzas: “‘Joyous, Love sings to me; the while he held my heart in his hands, and in his arms my lady lay asleep, wrapped in a veil.’”

“He woke her then, and trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand; weeping, I saw him then depart from me,’” Hannibal finishes.

Allegra is looking at Will now. “I asked, ‘ _Dotorre_ , do you believe a man could become so obsessed with someone from a single encounter?’ Now, I might believe his answer.” The woman smiles. 

Will tries to grin back. Inspector Pazzi and his wife have the distinctly uncanny ability to make Will feel very uncomfortable, not that it’s a tall feat for any of Will’s social encounters.

“The show is starting soon,” Hannibal says as members of the audience begin to take their seats. “I’m afraid this is where we take our leave. _Ciao, Signora, Signore_.”

“ _Ciao_.” Allegra begins to lead her husband before the stage. 

Pazzi follows, turning around to Hannibal and Will to say, “ _Ciao, Dotorre Lecter_. _Signore_ _Graham_.”

“ _Buona sera, Commendatore,_ ” Will replies, and he and Hannibal find their seats at the opposite side of the courtyard. 

“You know a lot of people here,” Will says. 

Hannibal picks up on Will’s accusatory tone. “I do apologize for that, Will. I would have held back if I’d expected my acquaintances to send you into _Signore_ Pazzi’s arms.”

“It’s more like he fell into mine.”

“Then I am grateful to have met his lovely wife,” Hannibal notes, “even if you far surpass her charms.”

“Even though he was persistent, I don’t think that was his design. Inspector Pazzi seemed to think we were both out of our element here.”

“ _Signore_ Pazzi may be, but you know the beauty of Dante quite well,” says Hannibal. 

“If you mean grotesque beauty, then yes,” Will answers, letting his fingers drift from his armrest. They touch the edge of Hannibal’s oxblood sleeve. “In ‘ _A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core_ ’, Love, divinely personified, compels Dante’s beloved Beatrice not just to know him in any trivial way— she has to ingest his heart, the beauty and the horror at the core of his being. A love that produces fear in the lover and beloved. The sonnet is a haunted vision, a warning to ‘every single gentle heart and loving’ Dante initially addresses.”

“The trope of consuming the lover’s heart was not so uncommon in medieval literature. Unlike the contemporary understanding of the act as gruesome, then it was seen as sublime, the height of illicit romance,” says Hannibal. 

The image dawns on Will clearly: the slow-beating heart, its trimmed arteries and veins splayed around like crimson ribbon, sitting on china. He sees the lover’s hand lift a fork to scrape the satin of the aorta and then pierce the firm muscle.

Hannibal’s sitting at the inside end of their row, so the candles in saucers that line the path throw light and shadow over him. “Can that not be a form of the highest love, Will? To feel the daily stab of hunger and find nourishment at the sight of one’s beloved, and to long for one’s beloved to ache for you as well?”

“So you’re saying that Dante’s narrator and his beloved shouldn’t fear what love might make them do to each other?”

Hannibal considers. “Only that fear and sorrow are as naturally parts of love as celebration. After all, to ache is to long for something in a state of pain. To truly hold your beloved, you must not resist the aspects of love that are also more unappetizing.”

The opera starts. Women painted in chalk-white make-up and trailing dresses move across the stage, the soprano among them. The choir sings with ethereal, dream-hazy softness until Beatrice begins, first resonant and low, and then ringing and high, her volume and grace acquiring greater height with the building instrumentals. She and the tenor, who Will assumes to be Dante’s narrator, alternate as they belt out verses. As the performance continues, it appears to reverse several aspects of the original sonnet. A devil with horns and a pitchfork maneuvers around the stage. In the climax, Dante’s narrator is held down by Beatrice’s escorts while she appears to rip his heart from him, foot by foot of red rope, her costumed face twisted with sorrow and joy. Will can’t tell if she is the consuming beloved or Love deified. Tenor and soprano continue to share their lines, as smiling women and expressionless robed figures look on. 

At the end of the opera, the soprano— Love, beloved, lover— raises the organ’s bloody rope to her lips and ties it around herself as a sash. What was once white is now red, painted in the colors of the extrications and consumption of her lover’s heart: marked, indelibly, by her love crime.

Hannibal rises to give a standing ovation. Even amidst all the clapping and murmur, Will feels a single point, something burrowing under his skin: he turns, and Rinaldo Pazzi is watching them. 

Once Will catches him, the inspector tries to avert his gaze, but having thought himself unnoticed, he’s already given Will enough to plainly _see_.

Pazzi knows Will— not his identity or his name, but he’d seen Will before that moment in the courtyard and approached him with a purpose. He wants to test Will; he wants to help Will; he wants to _use_ Will, though he’s not sure how yet. He hadn’t expected Will’s insightfulness, and that is… worrisome. Either Will is the ideal ally for his mission or he’s another monster for Pazzi to smite. 

_XVIII. A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core/ To every captive soul and gentle heart._ Hannibal.

Hannibal is very moved by the opera. 

He had expected no less from Dante, though the performance’s alterations are also quite riveting.

Once the show is over, robed figures, women in white-caked faces, and a single leering devil exit the stage to mingle with the attendees. The lover and beloved lower themselves into the masses last. 

Though Hannibal wishes to pay his compliments to the soprano— her ability to shift between joy and sorrow is very commendable— having _Signore_ Pazzi so close and interacting with Will was not in his evening plans. 

Hannibal is not sure what to make of Will’s apparent puzzlement. 

“Did you enjoy the show?”

Opera goers stream around them like shadows. They flock toward refreshments and small-talk. 

“I have to admit…” says Will, “my Italian’s not really up to par with thirteenth century poetry, especially in a Florentine dialect. Even though I recognized most of the Latin. It wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“Nor I,” says Hannibal. “They appear to have adapted the original.”

Will scoffs. “I’ll say. In Dante’s sonnet, Beatrice is the frightened, passive beloved who obeys Love’s demands. Here, she’s as powerful as Love itself. She tells Dante, _I_ am your master. She demands that he _sees_ his own heart, before she consumes it. She holds the power, because she possesses Dante’s heart and can see just who he is for herself. But she also has the power to reveal Dante’s true nature to him, too.”

That had struck Hannibal as curious as well. “Yes. ‘ _Io sono in pace, Io sono in pace’_ means ‘I am in peace, I am in peace’, despite consuming Dante’s heart with fear. Knowing still brings her attainment, while Dante’s joy is ‘converted to the bitterest tears’.”

“Because Dante’s narrator hasn’t attained what he wants most: love, in its entirety,” Will argues. “Dante’s narrator dreams of Beatrice in sweet, sleeping oblivion. The oblivion is his _and_ hers. His desires are contradictory: one the one hand, Beatrice reckoning with Dante’s true nature brings him sorrow; and on the other hand, Dante _urges_ Beatrice to see his heart. See my heart. He wants her to know him, and he doesn’t. He’s at war with himself.”

Will and Hannibal are skirting the tents where opera goers congregate around finger foods and wine. Hannibal can smell the fermentation and the fat of buttery tarts and the meat. Will exhibits no real desire to enter the sprawl and lingers at the edges where the torches are low and the path is mostly moonlight.

“Beatrice knows Dante, and she transforms,” Will says. “She’s elevated by the complexities of their love: the bitterness and sorrow, the salt of tears and tang of flesh. But their love is incomplete.”

Hannibal wonders. “One might say that Dante is transformed as well. His heart is set ablaze by desire, and then it is absorbed into his beloved’s body, forever altered. So why does love still elude him?”

“Maybe it’s because his beloved has eaten Dante’s heart, but he has yet to eat hers,” says Will. “She sees him, but he still needs to completely see her. To make her a part of him, too. And then, with her heart inside Dante, Dante’s beloved will continue to change.”

Will yawns, and he holds Hannibal’s arm for balance as they navigate the less-populated outskirts of the columns. Hannibal suspects the day’s events and more than a healthy amount of wine are finally getting to him. 

“You should be congratulating me, you know? Getting through an operatic performance and your operatic swarm— I don’t see that happening again in the near future,” Will says.

Hannibal cups the back of Will’s neck. It’s warm and smooth. “I expected nothing less, dear Will. And still you find yourself awake enough to philosophize on gruesome romances.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure _Signore Pazzi_ would be surprised.”

 _Ah, yes— that_.

“How do you know him, anyway?” asks Will, his arm falling to Hannibal’s waist.

“ _Signore_ Pazzi and I became acquainted at the Uffizi. We were admiring the same painting.”

“Have a lot of fateful encounters in art museums, do you?”

Fate is certainly how _Commendatore_ Pazzi regards it: from an abandoned truck with two dead swine— elevated as they were in gossamer and flora fitting the divine presences in Botticelli’s painting— and no evidence whatsoever that would identify _Il Mostro di Firenze_... to finding a young Lithuanian man sketching at the Uffizi gallery. Hannibal is certain _Commendatore_ Pazzi considered such a revelation as being delivered by nothing short of the hand of God himself.

Of course, Hannibal _loves_ defying the great Almighty. Though God may yet be playing into the _Commendatore’s_ current predicament. Just as he drops church roofs on congregations while they sing their hymns, so he delivers the faithful _Commendatore_ under the auspices of Hannibal’s care.

Killing must feel good to God, too. 

It must make him feel powerful.

“One or two,” Hannibal answers.

Will is thinking. “We didn’t meet, but I think he saw me there, too.”

The _Commendatore_ , Hannibal thinks, is certainly a persistent if inelegant man. The Fate’s interventions go on, depending on what perspective one takes. Having ordained a vision of Hannibal, who else should Pazzi notice one serendipitous day at the Uffizi but a young man at the doctor’s usually empty side: Will Graham. 

Hannibal can imagine Pazzi fixating on Will as the younger man engaged with Hannibal. Did he think this would be the day he’d finally capture _Il Mostro_ , to apprehend him in the aftermath of one of his horrific, arresting acts? Did he greedily anticipate Will being sliced open and dispossessed of his precious organs so that his blushing cavities might be filled with bursts of petals and pomegranate seeds?

Happily for Hannibal, and Will, that was not the case. The _Commendatore_ likely didn’t share their sympathies.

At least until today. 

One random night at an opera he would never attend for any other reason than his wife, Pazzi recognizes someone distinctive. He doesn’t know this young man by name or conversation. But he knows him. A young man, American. One with dark curls and piercing, avoidant eyes. Just like before, this young man is with Hannibal. And more miraculously still, alive. 

How Pazzi must have bided his time, making an excuse to his _Signora_ as he followed Will outside the interference of the crowd and of _Il Mostro_.

How, Hannibal reflects, did the _Commendatore_ try his fateful encounter with _Signore_ Graham?

Drawing and redrawing the Primavera as the _Commendatore_ watched him with blazing eyes in the Uffizi, Hannibal had sought nothing more than to amuse himself. How many days would it take the other man, Hannibal had entertained? How many Zephyrus’ and Chloris’? 

He did not mind being generous with his graphite and paper if it meant coaxing the other man toward his ruin. There would be nothing to implicate Hannibal Lecter, of course. Nothing exists in this world to tie Hannibal to _Il Mostro,_ save an unfortunate and coincidental predisposition toward Renaissance art. That would be perfectly understandable for a momentarily inconvenienced Hannibal, perfectly devastating for a _Commendatore_ Pazzi already imperiled by his tortured, famous lineage.

Hannibal imagined it would be a conclusion of such elegance.

Will, however.

Will is something else entirely. 

“He mentioned seeing you there before?”

Will cannot be dealt with elegance.

“Not exactly.”

Hannibal has no real desire to give the young man and their relationship such closure.

“He mentioned Boticelli though. _Very deliberately_.”

And Will is a force too formidable for elegant conclusions.

“Is that so?” Hannibal observes. The moonlight illuminates much now. It has carved out fissures in the stone columns, diminutive cracks that grow and grow as moonlight spills with wild abandon. The grass is no longer a lawn of a green but a pool of increasing black. 

The breeze moves across Will’s form, gently twisting the dark jacket around his chest, rippling the ends of his trousers. The pinstripes are constantly twinkling, broken light. 

Will gently lifts his hand and draws Hannibal’s palm against his, his fingers in Will’s. 

“Yeah,” Will says. 

Hannibal and Will exit the veiled splendor and darkening gloom of the courtyard. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the introduction of Inspector Pazzi! Couldn't have Will and Hannibal in Florence without Il Mostro's own Jack Crawford setting things further in motion.
> 
> I hope ya'll will forgive me for the extensive Dante notes! It's my English and Classics love coming in, haha. 
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.


	10. He Obediently Fed/The Monster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 of today's update! While my wifi's still working, thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.

_XIX. Umilmente pascea/ He obediently fed._ Will.

Will’s head is softly buzzing. His eyelids are heavy, so heavy, and he’s beginning to taste the bone-dryness now, too, the sour inside.

“Will.”

Hannibal hands him a glass of water, and Will gulps to free his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

“I didn’t bring anything...”

“That’s alright. Tomorrow.”

Will’s swimming against dark, silken sheets, the undershirt Hannibal lent him feathery on his skin. The other man’s breath is slow on the back of his neck.

Will gasps awake, tearing at the covers and disoriented. He’s all roughness, heaving, and he’s shaking and clammy with sweat.

He can remember inky antlers breaking through his skin, and for a moment he doesn’t know if his hands clawing into his arms are trying to hold him together or are prying something out from the wounds.

Strong fingers press him down.

“Hannibal,” Will gasps.

Gentling shushing Will and kissing his lips, the other man begins to nuzzle into the underside of Will’s jaw. He drinks in the scents of the younger man’s flesh.

“It’s just the intoxication, Will.”

Hannibal’s palms on him are searing, scalding Will’s lungs. His mouth gets lower, traveling down Will’s throat and chest and abdomen. Will buries the fingers of one hand in his pillow, the others in Hannibal’s hair. The younger man’s haggard shudders become low, tortured moans, and then they shatter altogether, the doctor entering inside him.

“Won’t I be taking you away from your _professore_?”

“Believe me, after yesterday, I think a little space between me and my _professore_ is more than educationally advisable. My walk of shame will be his walk of pleasure.” Will inhales his espresso, digging his toes beneath the cushion of the armchair opposite him. He’s wearing clothes he’d bought cheap after running to a convenience store at daybreak, despite Hannibal’s protests.

“Won’t I be taking _you_ away from something important?” Will asks over his drink. “After all, I already took you away from your sleep.” The bags under Will’s eyes feel particularly saggy this morning.

“In not an entirely unpleasant way,” Hannibal says, looking no rougher from sleeplessness. 

“Not entirely,” Will chuckles. “Sorry about that. I don’t usually have companions to bother with my nightmares.”

“Do they come to you frequently, Will?”

“Yeah.” Will picks up Dante’s _The_ _Divine Comedy_. Though it’s bound nicely, it also looks worn and well-used. “I’ve been diagnosed with an overactive imagination. No cure, apparently. Or ways to moderate the symptoms, though I think you’re the first doctor to try the hands-on approach.”

Hannibal lifts Will’s ankles from the armchair and seats himself across from the other man. “Although I am skeptical of literal interpretations of dream symbolism, the subconscious stirrings of the mind are often trying to signal something to the waking part. Do you remember your dreams?”

Will groans. “They didn’t really make sense. It’s more just sensations and impressions. Unpleasant ones. Raven feathers, antlers. Being stabbed. Something covered in flames.”

“ _Cor ardendo_ ,” Hannibal replies. “Dante’s burning heart.”

Hannibal appears to have nowhere to be, so he and Will lounge on their armchairs as they peruse the contents of Hannibal’s library. On his shelves, Will had seen internal medicine, psychology, visual arts, musical notation, classical literature, physics and mathematics, and other titles in too many different foreign languages for Will to grasp.

Will lets himself settle into _Purgatorio_ , lingering over the passages. Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, Hannibal brings them pastries and diced fruit and cut meat. Will stretches his legs and tries to help him do dishes. The staff of the _palazzo_ launder Will and Hannibal’s bloody clothes. 

“Would you mind if I drew you, Will?”

Will blinks. “Draw me?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t want to bother you, and you seem occupied with your reading.”

“You’ve been holding onto that for some time, haven’t you?”

Hannibal’s eyes gleam. “Admittedly.”

“Do I have to pose or something?”

“Just be exactly as you are,” Hannibal says, arranging himself like he had been in the Uffizi: his thick sketchbook on his knee, pencils and a scalpel at his side.

“Exactly as I am right now is…” Will says, trying to gesticulate to his nightmare-wild face and hair and complexion.

“Very handsome,” Hannibal finishes, and the man’s a good liar: he looks convinced. 

Will sighs into his palm. It won’t really bother him, even if Hannibal is too skillful to render him more flattering than he feels at the moment.

When Hannibal and Will stir themselves free of their literature and art for dinner, Will peeks at the other’s drawing and observes the faint, crisp lines that shape his own seated form. Hannibal has focused on the broader outlines of Will _—_ how he bends over his reading, engrossed, his calf resting over one knee. He hasn’t arrived at the details or darker shades yet, though his initial mapping summons the specter of Will’s being. 

“So you _do_ play piano.”

“As I said I did.” Hannibal meets Will at the side of the instrument. 

Will touches the stained wood, running his fingers along the lacquer. “Looks more conventional than the theremin, I’d say. I’m sure you can still pull some exciting sound out of it, though.” 

Hannibal responds with tunes that alternate between rumbling majesty and playful whimsy. His fingers overcome all obstacles in their often complicated paths to the melody. Will recognizes a tune: sober, sophisticated.

“ _Aria da capo_. From _Goldberg Variations_ ,” he says.

“Some of my favorites,” Hannibal says, smiling. 

“Very classical,” Will grins and he slides onto the piano seat beside Hannibal. They’re hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. “What about your own innovations? It looked like you have some original compositions in the library.”

“Not impressed, Will?”

Will pushes his side against Hannibal’s. “Before I have to go back tonight.”

Hannibal seems to consider Will’s request _—_ well, dare. He arranges his sheet music so that the white back of the page faces him. And then he begins to play.

The tune starts off light, elegant, almost bubbly, simplicity embedded with flourishes. Bold notes come in, a bombastic rise and pounding of Hannibal’s extremities. It’s close to a fairytale sound, evoking the emergent path of the protagonist on their journey. No, Will thinks. Not a fairytale: a bildungsroman. A growing up story, though it lacks any of the awkwardness and uncertainty of the traditional archetype. There is the constant sound of early childhood, and the faster swagger of boyhood, and a galloping burst of delight, and then _—_

Then the sound soars, frightening and beautiful and holding. Will nearly jolts off the piano stool with the crescendo, and he catches Hannibal smiling. Epic reverberation arises from Hannibal’s fingertips, like wind becoming music as it blows across a snowy landscape or an empty mansion. The melody has transformed into something grand and oppressive and layered with mesmerizing dark; grace weaves into severity, the swell of triumph with the hardness of personal challenge. Still, Will feels that under the highly structured volume, notes, and pacing, the sound is indicating something else: a hole. A precious, unspeakable silence. 

“I’m impressed,” Will says when the song ends. He wonders if this is what the inside of the piano feels like right now, strings still taut and vibrating with melodious momentum. “Who’s it for?”

“For you, of course.”

“And you, of course,” Will says. The song was, after all, Hannibal. A good deal of him, at least, artifice and so forth. 

“It’s about the one place I cannot go: home,” Hannibal replies.

Yes, Will suspects that’s also true. But for the music to be summed up into something as presumably straightforward as the haunted jaunts in one’s childhood home neglects a vital, more deviant aspect of its design. Every sound keyed to memory is leading to other memories. Rooms Hannibal can’t... bring himself to go, because nothing that escapes from them causes him any comfort. Will considers. And then he tries again. “What else?”

“What else would there be?”

“I don’t know,” Will admits. “But you do. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Will.”

So stubborn is the route he plans to go, huh? That’s fine. Will should probably back off anyway, leave the facade of the composition intact. It wouldn’t be satisfying, but it would be easy. 

Except, he knows, it wouldn’t be.

“There is something missing from the sound,” he reads. 

“And you said you didn’t play.”

 _Not the game you’re playing._ “It’s not something overlooked,” Will decides, in what he thinks is the most complicated thing he’s read in his life. Now it’s like he’s in the fairytale, maneuvering through twisted thorns, the brambles so dense and powerful they block out all light. But Will is no fairytale wanderer: other people construct fairytales and accept them, because the average mind constructs all sorts of fantasies when it doesn’t want to believe something. Will has feared and hated many things in the dark, but not this. He wants to see. He _needs_ to see Hannibal. 

“It’s not even an omission, per say,” Will says slowly. “Everything else is... meticulously constructed. Flawless and awesome. Just as it should be. But there’s something that exists, beyond and inside the sound. The sound can’t entirely account for it, though it tries. It’s sorrow, joy. But not for one’s protections and protectors. No. It’s the thing cared for, but... gone. Not stolen, though. Absent and present. Something dear.”

“Mischa.”

There is a shift, barely there, but it makes itself known to Will all the same. It still disturbs the air ever so slightly, because it has to, forcing language on something it cannot fill: an inexorable void. It’s a hunger that has been met by consumption, but despite all logical systems, it still remains. 

“My sister,” says Hannibal. “She was mine. Not my child, but she was my charge.” His fingers smooth over the white of the piano keys, almost subconsciously, but Will knows that it’s not without purpose— Hannibal never acts without some endgame. “She taught me so much about myself,” he says, contemplatively.

She’s a part of you, thinks Will. He could say that. Having read the music, reading Hannibal, Will knows it to be true. 

But not entirely, or at least not satisfactorily. To be a part of someone like Hannibal Lecter means being nothing less than the man himself _—_ a concurrence of the unprecedented and ineffable. 

And that’s what Mischa is: not a light in the dark, but a shadow in a mirror. And Will’s looking, but he doesn’t know from which side. Is he observing the reflection, or is he looking out at its source, casting the long, indefinite shadow? 

“What’s wrong, Will?”

It’s not the content of the revelation that upsets Will, though hearing somebody talk about losing their sister shouldn’t be easy to hear. Hannibal knows that, so he’s not comforting.

He’s curious.

Will knows, and he doesn’t. “She doesn’t... explain it,” he says, faltering, stumbling over his ignorance. _She doesn’t explain you_. “The nature of the melody. In spite of all that she is to it, she doesn’t quantify it.”

 _Doesn’t quantify what_ you _do._

Could anything, Will wonders? Even when there are grounds inside Hannibal where it is not safe for him to tread, his nature is as a castle, too vast to be diminished. 

Hannibal appears to be considering Will. “Most would say the death of one so close is the defining moment in a man’s life. What he does onto the world is a result of what was once done onto him.”

“Most would say that,” Will agrees. “But you and I aren’t like most people.”

Hannibal is, after all, the composer of the song of himself. Will wonders what others hear when Hannibal plays. Is his song mellifluous, so wholesome that they find their faiths restored? Do they feel redeemed, graced with divine benediction? 

Will wonders what Hannibal hears. He doesn’t think it’s anything that pure. Hannibal’s taste in music is like his tastes in other aspects of culture. He enjoys art where enchanting gods beguile and participate in forceful unions. His culinary appetites are robust, savoring delicate flavors but also meat bloody and rare.

Screams might fill some places, but for Hannibal, the corridors do not echo screaming. Because he hears music. And then... 

“You create a melody out of things that only you experience. No one else,” says Will. “Because of that, no one really understands… your composition. They’re just being led along, awash with the sounds.” 

Hannibal’s sitting together with Will now exactly like they were earlier in the Uffizi gallery. His head is tilted. His body’s angled just so that he’s both across from Will and beside him.

“What about you, Will?” asks Hannibal. “With all your empathy, can you experience it? What I experience?”

“Not completely, no,” Will says. He’s never met anyone like Hannibal, someone who pushes him to the limits and extremes of his empathy. “I can’t hear what you hear _—_ what you heard _—_ the way you do. It won’t sound the same to me. But, I understand the nature of your melody. And _—_ I can hear more.”

Hannibal’s hands are resting atop the keyboard. Will places one of his own beside him. He presses down a pale key close to the center, and it emits a sliver of a cry, a chirrup.

“E,” says Hannibal.

“Yeah,” Will responds. “In C major, it’s sung as…”

“…‘Mi,’” Hannibal finishes.

Mi.

Mischa.

But Will doesn’t say. He holds the key, then lifts the note. Hannibal does not move to sustain it. He lets the note rise into the air, and then disappear.

“What do you experience?” Will asks, swallowing. “What... do you hear?”

Hannibal answers, “an aching.”

“Love,” says Will.

Hannibal agrees: “Yes.”

“Loss,” says Will.

Hannibal agrees: “Yes.”

Hannibal’s fingers glide over to where Will’s rest on the thin notes of ivory. He brushes Will’s knuckles, the back of his hand, the inside of his wrist.

“Tell me, Will. What is the melody now? What,” asks Hannibal, “is its nature?”

“Beautiful,” says Will, letting himself experience all of Hannibal’s touches. Will slides the tips of his fingers down the other’s palm, not quite holding and not quite moving away. “Terrifying.”

Like he’s falling down, down, down in perpetual drop from the cliff.

Hannibal’s fingers migrate up Will’s forearm, elbow and shoulder to cup the back of Will’s neck. Will leans his head in, closer and closer, until their foreheads are touching.

“For you?” Hannibal asks. “Or for me?”

Will feels him. “I don’t know.” He closes his eyes. “Both.”

Their lips brush against each other, the sheerest of contact. The ghost of true breath. Raising his hand to Hannibal’s jaw, Will keeps them there a little while longer. Their mouths barely move, feeling the shapes of each other as they press together.

“I have to go.”

Hannibal’s palm moves down Will’s neck and back until it rests again on the piano bench. Will leans away.

“Yes.”

“I know where you are,” Will says. “You know where I am.” 

“I do need to finish your composition.”

Will laughs. “Yeah, my drawing.”

Will rises from his place beside Hannibal. “All good things to those who wait. My class will be at Forte di Belvedere on Thursday. I’d say it’s less than ten minutes away from here on foot.”

Hannibal smiles. “That’s not far at all.”

“No,” says Will. “Not at all.”

In his dorm room, Will is forced to waking. He stops himself from leaping out of bed. Instead, he measures his aching breath and recalls the sensation of cracking open without becoming entirely undone. 

The antlers had pushed into him. They would not relent. They emerged out the other side of Will like bony wings or jagged branches. New growth to Will’s existing structure. 

Will’s breath feels so painfully raw though, and when he brings a shaking hand over his face, it’s covered with sweat. He’s falling, he’s shattering, he’s reborn with terrifying, exhilarating, hateful fracture and force _—_

Still, his mind is clear with purpose once the hours pass into early morning.

“ _Buongiorno, Signore_ Graham!” Will’s professor says with rare delight. “It appears you are grabbing life by the horns.” Will’s professor finds the young man lounging in the hostel’s common space with a cup of cappuccino.

Just how Will hoped he would find him. “ _Buongiorno, Professore_ ,” Will answers over the bitter, sweet, invigorating liquid. “I s’pose so.” Will gestures to the stack of newspapers on the table, and a crate of old issues the hostel has kept sits at his feet. 

Will leafs through the pages of one, scanning the picture. “Maybe you could help me, _Professore_. I can’t make out all the Italian.”

The other man is thrilled. Pulling his seat closer to Will’s, he says, “but of course! What do you want to know?”

Pulling the newspaper crisply open with a flattening of its spine, Will lays out the image. “This.” At first glance it looks like a painting. The man’s lips are puckered as if he is mid-exhale, his skin icy blue. The woman’s eyes are so alive as they fix upon him, her body floating in swaths of flowing fabric and garlands. 

The two corpses are nothing short of transmuted, in artistic deference and defiance to the _Primavera_. 

Will’s not sure if he’s seen anything like it. 

Maybe, he has, though. 

“‘ _Il Mostro di Firenze’_ , huh? ‘The Monster of Florence.’” The other man speaks haltingly. This is not the local distraction he was hoping for his student. “Thinking about your lawful and righteous studies, Mr. Graham?”

“Not really. It’s more extracurricular,” Will says, sipping his coffee and reading the evidence of the photo in closer detail. It tastes like everything he wants and doesn’t want. 

“Call it a _personal_ interest.”

 _XX. Il Mostro_. Hannibal.

Monday: _“Due bottiglie di Bâtard-Montrachet e li tartufi bianchi, per favore.”_

Inside Vera Dal 1926, Hannibal’s favorite fine grocer on the Ponte Vecchio, a kind of night-vision is required for full appreciation. The daylight of the bridge falls away to a sudden onset of darkness as wreaths of fresh meat and harvest block out the windows and cloister around the counter.

Though Hannibal’s sensitivity to the most sparing amount of light is exceptional, he can even more strongly smell the shop’s offerings. Tart figs sit on parchment napkins under glass domes, rock candy is arranged in treacly piles, and black garlic is acrid underneath papery skins. Equally pungent are sprigs of thyme and rosemary, though despite the best efforts of these herbs to conceal them, the metallic odors of slaughtered hares and pheasants drawn up on thick ropes to bleed out still come through.

It absolutely stirs his appetites. 

Flesh elevated to food, and food elevated to art.

“ _Grazie_ ,” Hannibal says to the woman behind the counter. She moves swiftly, used to the signature purchase: two bottles of wine and white truffles. 

And while Hannibal has often enjoyed these food items, they seem especially apt for the moment.

Which of their qualities might be best ascribed to Will?

 _Batard Montrachet_ , requiring tending in exceptional soil and climate conditions so that it can transform from vine cluster to transcendental experience?

Or is Will more like the white truffle: resistant to attempts at cultivation, so one must forage for the thing as it grows in the wild, and then can never cook it, for fear of losing its scent and flavor?

Either way, Hannibal suspects, he shall soon find out.

Will’s true nature is increasingly intoxicating, and Hannibal will not allow him to continue to suppress its essence under the atrocious aftershave of sheep-like morality any longer.

Though he also does not deny that some of his eagerness comes from a desire to mitigate the potentially less self-preserving consequences of Will’s insights. Never has Hannibal encountered such a force of mind and circumstance. He wants to see how Will reacts to knowing and seeing Hannibal. He wants to see what Will becomes, undone and remade. Will he try to destroy Hannibal? Will he try to destroy himself? 

Will he try to love him?

 _Batard Montrachet_ or _tartufi bianchi,_ Hannibal will certainly enjoy their time together.

Tuesday: Hannibal returns to his sketch of Will. Even in the absence of his model, he finds it easy to continue his work.

Their mind palaces are growing, both his and Will’s. They share rooms between them.

Closing his eyes, Hannibal can see Will.

He’s in the Palazzo Capponi alle Rovinate seated at the dark of Hannibal’s table and in the red of his armchair; Will is winding through Florence’s narrow streets; Will is scruffy and odorous as he sits close by Hannibal on their bench in the Uffizi gallery, eyes lost as he looks upon the _Primavera_.

Hannibal sharpens his point with his scalpel and draws Will in all his permutations.

He wonders if Will can see them in the spaces they connect.

Wednesday: Though rubbing the bronze boar of the fountain _Il Porcellino_ is commonly believed to bring good luck, Hannibal thinks its newest visitor isn’t clutching at it with that same purpose.

Though Hannibal supposes he could be a very foolish swine. Maybe he thinks luck will stop the fatal flow of blood.

On any of the tourists filling Mercato Nuova, his hands might have been considered capable, his mind equally so. But the pickpocket’s attempts to grab Hannibal had been less than inspired.

Hannibal was amused by how much distance he could put between himself and the offender before the man, dazed, reeling from some kind of blow, finally discovered his severed femoral artery. Perhaps it was the gush of hot blood into his face, the utter collapse of his legs. Now he might wish for a return to sweet oblivion, like the throngs of tourists who pass by, not even minding the lean figure swaying, blood trailing, and leaving one last red handprint on the statue of a famous, lucky pig.

How would Will have responded to such an encounter?

Hannibal supposes Will might have sympathized with the weakened creature’s plight. The skin of his skull had been pulled tight by hunger and illness, even if frequent dips had made his hands more arrogant than piteously desperate. Would Will have pulled the pick-pocket away from the uncaring sprawl, offered him succor?

Though Hannibal supposes that scenario isn’t completely unlikely, he is more drawn to another: Will, his darker instincts excited by the clamoring crowd, feels invasive hands upon him. Will reads those hands and their intentions: they possess envy for the fortunes of another, rage toward this stranger he thinks so better-off, and pride at such an easy violation. Will sees this other man’s brokenness, because his empathy will allow him to know all of the petty, troubled mind. But even though Will sees the fractures in the other man’s psyche and because Will sees all they let in and what they produce, he won’t _bow_ to the other. Will does not bow. He will not let himself be felt and pillaged and vanquished.

Not without repercussions.

Hannibal imagines Forte di Belvedere will be a truly magnificent new place for Hannibal and Will to share.

From the parapet of the military structure, the whole of Florence is visible.

The Duomo emerges from the city’s skyline. The picturesque exterior of the cupola conceals the infamous paintings inside that apply glowing scarlet and theatrical chiaroscuro to visions of Hell **.** In the chapel, devils spear and flay the writhing bodies of the accursed whom smash each other’s skulls and brutalize each other’s naked flesh for vain escape from their torment. 

From that same view, the Palazzo Vecchio rises over the Arno. Its spire is erected close to the ruins of the Uberti family, barely infringing on the blasphemed space once occupied by the reputed rebels of Florence. Farinata degli Uberti alone opposed his people’s laying waste to the city; after he died, his remains were exhumed by Inquisition and tried for heresy, and found guilty, they were posthumously executed.

What a figure Will will cut against this sweeping and terrible panorama.

What beautiful violence he could wreak, with the right direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the start of the chase in earnest!
> 
> I consider this the informal beginning of Part II of the series, structured in three parts, like the three seasons of the tv show and the three parts of Dante's Divine Comedy. Part I is the attraction and the Inferno, Part II is the purgatory/Purgatorio and hunt/courtship, and Part III is paradise.
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!


	11. Forte/Gnawing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello,
> 
> I hope everyone is well, and I'm so sorry for the lateness of this update! My Internet refused to cooperate with me last weekend, and I have since purchased a USB network adapter that has made my life so much easier.
> 
> This time, I SWEAR, the double update will be true. One chapter today, and the other tomorrow.
> 
> My best wishes for everybody's physical and mental wellbeings. I hope this reading distracts you a bit, even with its fantastic darkness. It is wonderful hearing people's thoughts; your feedback gets me through this moment that has been a challenging educationally and creatively.
> 
> My regular disclaimer: My Italian is extremely basic, so I apologize for any translation errors here and will amend as necessary.
> 
> Also, another disclaimer: this chapter is loaded with classical citations, so if you like Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Dante's Divine Comedy, and other research, you're in luck! 
> 
> Lastly, and I personally don't believe that this is a necessary disclaimer, but just in case: there is switching of sexual roles/positions here. As I believe would be the case in a romantic and sexual relationship between Will and Hannibal. The content more deserving of actual warnings is Will's moral ambiguity and Hannibal's inability to not allude to his cannibalism.
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

_XXI. Forte_. Will.

Thursday: From Forte di Belvedere, Florence looks like it’s on fire.

Spread across each point of the fort’s star-shaped bank, Will’s classmates marvel at the sight. They think the night landscape is beautiful. The horizon pulsates with light.

To Will, it looks damned. Who’s setting the city ablaze, Will wonders. Its denizens?

Its Monster?

Will’s not sure what to feel when his instinctive answer is “yes” on both accounts.

His peers are worn out by a full day spent walking. They yearn to move onto more exciting _after-hours_ activities. They’re wriggling flesh and impatient hissing noises against the stark architecture of the fort, the structure and décor of which is so stripped down it looks like bone. 

Will tries to pay attention to his professor. Like any activity, he’s gotten better at it with practice. Over the week, Will and his professor poured over newspapers and photos. His mentor translated recordings of months-old news broadcasts that contained some crime analyses but mostly shocked viewers and frustrated _polizia_. Though initially enthusiastic to humor his wayward student, Will knows his professor is exhausted by their efforts.

And wracked with petrifying _terror._

Guess the other man didn’t know everything about Florence.

And remains none the wiser.

Though Will has no plans to change that.

“Mr. Graham,” Will’s professor says once his other students have wandered away (something Will had also been trying to accomplish). The other man is gripping Will with some of his characteristic excitement, but he’s also exhibiting a new and increasingly familiar trait: fear. His hands are on Will like he thinks the younger man is a lifeline. “I realize you’ve been researching the more… _sensational_ aspects of Florence.”

That’s one way to put it, though Will supposes it’s true. His findings have produced no lack of sensation. Will imagines his experience of it is more complicated than his professor’s straightforward and all-consuming one, however. 

His professor waves a ticket. The golden corner of the stub catches the artificial lights: another one of Florence’s flickering flames.

His professor licks his lips and quickly says, “The Palazzo Capponi _professori_ , directors of the Uffizi and Belle Arti Commission are having a salon. ‘Death, damnation and desecration in Dante’. I was interested at the time, but…”

— _I don’t want to hear any more about bodies disfigured as fleshy masterpieces, once lively couples arranged in grisly painterly tableaux, police chasing the shadows of a beast and not even finding footprints, organs ripped from those walking the streets_ I _walk_ — 

His professor practically shoves the ticket into Will’s chest. His eyes are too wide, his smile too tight. Then, he walks in the exact opposite direction.

Will’s grateful. Because, yeah— the ticket has one too many zeros to lie comfortably in his Euro price range.

Hannibal probably would have covered both their costs, though, because in all honesty, this is where Hannibal’s going to be. Here’s where he’ll lead Will, practically hand-in-hand, in their continuing Florentine pilgrimage. Hannibal would not cease their journey for something as paltry as money. In all that he is, money is no object; nor is Will’s resistance to charity; nor is conventional decorum about personal boundaries; nor, apparently, are the most fundamental technologies that keep society turning however imperfectly round and round with its populace at least moderately intact.

Will’s not even sure he’s surprised. Maybe that’s why he was able to read Inspector Pazzi’s motivations and behavior so easily. He’s certain that the inspector had planned to be more covert as he siphoned Will for knowledge. But he had given Will everything he needed to see:

Pazzi was looking for a monster. That led him to Botticelli’s _Primavera_ , which led him to Will. But it also led him to a man whom he and Will had both witnessed recreate the Botticelli in painstaking pencil. The drawing that came together before both their eyes was no less transfixed or masterful than another reproduction— a sculpture carved in overflowing, lifeless human flesh.

Will sees Pazzi’s logic and on an objective level, he agrees with the conclusion.

Personally and intimately knowing Hannibal, Will agrees for a very different set of reasons.

Hannibal is like no one else. He’s self-possessed, a man of entirely his own making, and his ego requires no conventional means of reinforcement.

He’s a Renaissance man, capable of dissecting the cognitive and the physical in ways most people could not master across lifetimes.

And he is hedonistic, a sensationalist, an utter consumer, relishing just as much in quintessential delight as he does in quintessential pain.

So Will sees Hannibal like he has always seen Hannibal. The assemblage of pieces, however, like a portrait in stained glass, is becoming more monumental and more spectacular and more terrible than Will could have ever predicted.

How he feels about this new knowledge…is just as monumentally and spectacularly and terribly complex.

But he feels. Oh, does he _ever_. Hannibal has never left Will short on feeling, so it makes sense that only he could make Will feel so immensely—

Will arrives at the event venue. Red rope on gleaming stanchions cordons off an open doorway where he can already smell a lavish brew of champagne and dust. That odor and the glaring guard are enough to repulse him. _Might be for the best_ , says something brusque and no-nonsense in the back of Will’s mind, sounding suspiciously like his father. 

Not just _might_ be, Will thinks. 

He knows: it would be for the best.

But then he catches a sign with an old etching of Dante’s pilgrim and his spiritual guide standing on ice. Dante observes the half-frozen figures at his feet, trapped like insects in amber, but other than looking, he makes no move to save them. His passage through hell is not over. 

In the illustration’s nuanced shading and extraordinary subject matter, it looks exactly like something—

_Dear Will_

—like Hannibal would draw.

So Will flashes his ticket at the guard, who frowns and blinks and rips the golden edge, before the younger man immediately crumples the thing in his fist. 

This present party isn’t a simple collection of academics. There’s unbearable pomp and splendor, derived from rarefied reputations for re-entrenching Florence’s hallowed past. The guests breathe citation, they flaunt their own research, and every erudite conversation congratulates, placates or maims.

Will feels their glances skate over him and the guard bore holes into his back, echoes of sensations he’s known all his life— from his schools to the docks— reverberating through a never-ending cavern of blindness.

“’Wouldn’t he prefer to put up with absolutely anything else,’” Will mutters solitarily, “’rather than associate with those opinions that hold in the cave and be that kind of human being?’”

“’I think he would prefer to endure everything else rather than be that kind of human being’, dear Will.”

Will doesn’t even need to turn around. “Hannibal,” he exhales, slowly, in a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

The other man stands at his shoulder, and the only description for the way he’s dressed as opposed to his wrinkled-flannel, gray-boot trudging companion is… incomparable. Hannibal’s tuxedo is smooth ebony, his shoes are polished leather, and his hair is dark gold and slicked back. Will has to fight down the irrational impulse to bark a laugh at the necktie that perches somehow both jaunty and ominous around Hannibal’s neck. Lavish though Hannibal’s costume may be, and it _is_ garish enough to earn the eyebrow that arches into Will’s curls, it also seems like a natural progression in his elite and specifically tailored wardrobe choices:

Another costume to disguise the form underneath.

“Or I should say, hello, Doctor Lecter.”

“Mr. Graham.” Hannibal passes Will a flute of champagne. “It’s good to see you again.”

Before Will can respond, Hannibal guides him through the aisle between the two small seating sections. His hand only hovers over Will’s lower back, never touching. 

“It appears that you have been preparing for the evening in a most unorthodox way,” Hannibal remarks, bemused, as he waits for Will to sit and then seats himself beside him. “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. An intriguing preface for one of Italy’s most iconic minds.”

“You don’t think they’ll appreciate the diversion to Ancient Greco-philosophy?” Will asks, watching. These people are like statues. Layers of dust on classical artistry conceal their warping and cracks. There’s creeping lichen all over them and the brutal, irreverent making of their designs.

But none so brutal and irreverent as the one beside him.

“On the contrary,” says Hannibal. “The _Studiolo_ is a small, fierce group. Their members have ruined a number of academic reputations. You’ll be equipped well by refusing to follow their rules of conduct.”

“’ _Studiolo_?’”

“An exclusive group of Medieval Italian and pre-Renaissance Florence _professori._ They are among the world’s most renowned in their disciplines. They are named after an ornate private study. Those who kept one in the fifteenth century were known to be intellectuals.” Hannibal looks with almost clinical fascination upon the figures. “Machiavelli described his _studiolo_ as a space to converge with the courts of the ancients and to seek out their wisdom.”

“Machiavelli, huh? ’If an injury has to be done to a man… it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared,’” says Will. “I wonder. Do the members of this _Studiolo_ try and convene with Machiavelli for insights?”

“Do you find his words insightful, Will?” asks Hannibal.

“There are… takeaways,” says Will. He sits casually with his head tilted slightly back and his knees spread just so. “More in some of his words, less in others.”

Hannibal has crossed his legs and folded his hands over his knees. “What are your other takeaways?”

“’Everyone sees what you appear to be,’” Will says. “’Few really know what you are.’”

Slides are fed into the projector, and an image of Lucifer appears on the screen.

Will can barely see Hannibal’s face in the flashes of light and dark.

A hush descends over the _Studiolo_ as an older man takes to the podium, though Will only heeds him in an animal sense by flashes of movement— pale hands twisting a water bottle cap, slow fingers flipping through a stack of notes— that occur in the peripheries of Will’s vision. 

His attention is entirely on Hannibal.

And it appears that Hannibal’s is the same. Bending low, he murmurs into Will’s ear, “Blindness, though rarely sought, is not so easily dispensed with.” Will catches the flash of maroon in his eye. “The prisoner expelled from Plato’s cave, for instance…’would not the one who had been dragged like this feel, in the process, pain and rage?’” 

Hannibal moves, smoothing the line of Will’s collar, though Will doesn’t think that’s why his fingers remain in place; he’s feeling the rhythm of Will’s pulse.

_Pain and rage…_

_One, two, three, four…_

“’And when he got into the sunlight,’” continues Hannibal, slowly, unblinking, “’wouldn’t his eyes be filled with the glare, and wouldn’t he thus be unable to see any of the things that are now revealed to him as the unhidden?’”

Hannibal doesn’t shift. He’s utterly immobile.

And Will can’t bring himself to close his eyes, even as the projector floods them with light.

Because he knows that Hannibal knows: that Will _sees_ him. 

The velocity of freefall tugs at his stomach, and the whole room turns on an axis, inverting, and Will is dropping down, down, down.

“’…He would not be able to do that at all,’” Will answers, the lines altered, the roles reversed. Now he’s Glaucon, the student, and Hannibal is Socrates, his mentor. _That_ sets a wave of anger rolling through him, of infuriated _helplessness_ ; it makes him want to shatter the façade, toss the torch so the damp of the cave floor extinguishes its maddening glow. 

But he doesn’t, even if Hannibal would prefer nothing other than to continue the game. Will has plans, and they’re not to raise a gun to his suspected killer. He’s not here to destroy him.

“’At least’”, Will recites, evening his voice, “’not right away.’”

The curator and translator at Palazzo Capponi proceeds to give a presentation about the punishment of the devil and those who strayed away from God’s love that Will finds agreeable, superficial, and dull, and it’s not just because Will’s mind wanders elsewhere. He finds it easy to slip back into the charade, the indulgence of myth and metaphors, because isn’t that what he and Hannibal have always done? 

Locate each other indirectly, through parables and psychiatry, because it’s that or forever be misconstrued or wrapped in the safety of a shroud? 

It’s strange how things change, but they don’t change at all. Will absorbs the presenter’s words, but instead of deconstructing them as he would with the evidence in a case, he’s weaving a vivid tapestry of support for an opinion that he might offer to Hannibal. Like he’s done a hundred times, only with Hannibal, like he’s… _eager_ … to do again. It’s necessary, it’s what Will planned, but it’s also unnervingly _easy_ :

Will would acknowledge that it’s infinitely more comforting to experience the redemptive powers of goodness than to be trapped in ice or subjected to flagellation and gad-flies— that much is obvious— but Will would also argue that the curator does little to expound on the more complex feelings of Dante’s pilgrim— on his way to his divine love, the pilgrim also seeks knowledge from the sinner— he comes to know the pain and possibilities of hell, and he struggles with heavenly grace—

And as Will would talk, Hannibal would smile that arcane smile. Lips still curled around it, he would ask Will if he would like to have heard more about _that?_ How the wanderer looks upon the repentant and unrepentant damned, and takes some measure of insight from them? Beauty from their inelegant suffering? Doesn’t that make Will want to know _more_?

And Will wouldn’t honestly be able to say… no.

“You don’t appear to be impressed, Will.”

Will emerges from his thoughts warily. Though Hannibal’s face is veiled with politeness, Will can tell that he is already forming his rebuttals to the lecture.

“You, too.”

Hannibal does what he always does: abides stubbornly by etiquette and waits for Will’s response.

So Will does, because what fisherman would deny a hungry catch his lure? 

“It sounds like they’re telling us to avoid all wrongdoing and temptation, which is great in theory,” says Will without rancor. “But they’re missing the point.” 

_There_ — Hannibal’s eyes gleam. Reflected in them is the blood-red of Will’s bait.

Then Will proceeds to relay his argument just as he imagined it.

Hannibal smiles like Will thought he would, but Will didn’t foresee the pull the corners of his mouth would have on Will’s gut. Like magnets with opposite but equal charges, his stomach stretches thin, airy and unsettled, the farther Hannibal’s appreciation unfolds across his subdued features.

“Dante _has_ to pass through hell on his way to paradise,” Will cuts off abruptly, even though he’s far from finished. He needs the weightlessness to disappear, however.

He needs an anchor to hold him down. 

Hannibal appears not to notice Will’s curtness. “Extraordinary. Most people do not associate hell and paradise together. Like Dante, you delight in wickedness”— apparently Will’s face is already forming some kind of response, because Hannibal elaborates, though not soothingly—“and you berate yourself for the delight.”

_...huh._

“I don’t… _delight_ ,” Will manages to hiss. 

He must work to unclench his teeth. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling with such sudden power and lack of power, with extreme cold and heat. He doesn’t know _why_.

“You…” Will breathes, feeling oddly in control and out of control. “ _You_ delight.”

Though Hannibal’s expression doesn’t change, his eyes _do,_ with almost undetectable, reptilian poise. He wasn’t prepared for that bit of honesty on Will’s part, then. Good—serves him right. Maybe he did expect him to have sussed out his other persona, but he hadn’t predicted Will’s forthcoming, his reckless and irresistible urges to unsettle Hannibal whenever he could. 

Because, Will—

“I… _tolerate_.”

“ _Dotorre Lecter_! _A di vederti!_ ”

A man and a woman dressed in finery and crystal arrive over at Hannibal. Because they must. As always.

“ _Buona sera_ , _Signore e Signora Albizzi_ ,” Hannibal replies, shaking hands. Other than the lock-and-key twist in his gaze, Will hadn’t noticed any tension in Hannibal’s body, so he’s impressed when the other man’s muscles evidently uncoil, harmless once more.

Will, however, lacks Hannibal’s practice. The couple looks curiously at him, and Hannibal starts talking before Will’s muteness becomes too conspicuous: “How did you like the presentation?”

“Oh, wonderful!” _Signore_ Albizzi starts in English before he spins a long-winded analysis of the evening’s event. Will knows better: though pleasant and mild-mannered in appearance, this man had only barely been listening. He would smile and nod at the ghostly screen as his eyes followed the curves of a blonde woman with a dress low on her hourglass figure.

“Yourself, _Dottore_?” _Signora_ Albizzi asks. She has the familiar symptoms of those infatuated with Hannibal: she is torn between prostrating and lifting herself to appear like someone who could share his eminence.

“Personally, when I heard the subject would be death, damnation, and desecration,” Hannibal says benignly, “I’d hoped to hear more about the matter of chewing in Dante’s work.”

“Chewing, _Dottore_?”

“Count Ugolino in the Ninth Circle of Hell chewing on the archbishop’s head,” Will supplies automatically. The connection occurs to him with barely conscious effort. “And Satan in the Fourth Ring of that same circle, his three faces chewing Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.”

“Yes,” says Hannibal, nodding at Will’s comprehension. “Those at the Ninth and lowest Circle of Hell, reserved to punish…”

“…Betrayers,” Will says coldly.

He clutches his drink tighter.

There’s a dream-like, non-sequitur quality to the way Hannibal answers, “’ _S’el fu sì bel com’elli è ora brutto, e contra ’l suo fattore alzò le ciglia, ben dee da lui proceder ogne lutto’.”_ Will only understands Hannibal’s designs once he translates: “’if he was once as handsome as he is now ugly… and, despite that, raised his brows at his maker, one can understand how every sorrow has its place in him.’”

“The fall of Lucifer,” says Will. 

“He was the most beautiful of the Seraphim,” says Hannibal. “According to Dante, his fall from grace is evident in his perpetual, hellish mastication.”

“Because he chews,” Will responds incredulously. 

When Hannibal observes him a little too protractedly, Will realizes he’s been biting the rim of his glass for he doesn’t know how long into their conversation. Will removes the flute from the danger zone of his mouth. The edge of his sparkling cup is now opaque with a network of minute fractures. It’s obvious, the silvery pressure points from the blades of his teeth. 

“Correct,” says Hannibal. Though he contains himself before the Albizzis, Will sees something flare up in him. It’s not the quiet, fatal intensity of Hannibal’s usual self-preservation, however.

It’s _desire_. 

Like the other man wants to disentangle the stem of Will’s glass from his fingers and to lift it to his own mouth. As if he’d take the second, forbidden bite. His longing has to be exciting the over-compensatory mirror neurons in Will’s brain, because want unfurls like a molten flower, _red-hot_ , in Will’s stomach. He attempts to shut off his empathy, darken the image of the shards of light on Hannibal’s lips, like shining juice from a fruit.

If only it were just Will’s empathy.

“It’s one of the essential traits of his perversion,” says Hannibal. “Is chewing not one of the greatest offenses to God, the act of destroying his creations? Societally, it is considered an ugly thing. Dante finds it to be the antithesis to goodness and divine grace.”

“Satan doesn’t just chew,” Will replies icily. “He chews… _and he_ _weeps_. Like the Good Scripture says, evildoers don’t get to enter the kingdom of heaven. No. They’re cast out into the darkness, ‘where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

“The rage and pain of the damned,” says Hannibal. “To chew is all they can do with their powerlessness.”

“Not necessarily.”

The Albizzis seem quietly amused by the present conversation, and Will, the strange, young American. They’re not sure what to make of the pair of men, but then again, isn’t this what they paid for? 

Fizzy drinks and harmless gossip and beguiling themselves with a quaint slideshow of flayed bodies in eternal bodily and spiritual torment? Others’ torment, of course. It’s unthinkable that it could ever be their own. They lead decent, distinguished lives, after all, looking from the outside in.

Or, more accurately, Will thinks they're looking from the inside out. They believe they’re protected from all the dark, savage things inside the fortresses of their stately rooms and pedigreed crowds. Nothing that could hurt them enters here.

Little do they know.

Will’s ignoring them. Right now, it’s just him and Hannibal, like it always is. Like it always has been. Attendees come in and out of focus like lambent tongues of flame. They flicker, and then they’re gone. 

“Lucifer may be trapped in ice,” says Will, “but he can punish the worst betrayers of humanity with his claws and his teeth. Just as there’s no escape from his torment, so there’s no escape from theirs. Chewing is to deliver the greatest retribution on the worst of all. Count Ugolino, too. He might not be getting out of hell, but at least he gets to eternally set his teeth into the skull of his enemy.”

“It sounds,” says Hannibal, his hands folded behind him, and Will gets the sudden impression that he’s holding himself _back_ , “like chewing still satisfies, then. Not because it is about doing something good. Because it is about doing something bad.”

Like a flash of inspiration, Will can _see_ it. Where Hannibal’s leading him. Where he’s always been leading him. “And doing bad things to bad people…” says Will, “feels _good_.”

Hannibal smiles. “Why merely tolerate the cravings of wickedness, Will, when you can obtain relief and chew?”

And more vividly than he’s aware of either of their very real spectators, Will imagines Hannibal’s long fingers tracing the curve of Will’s jaw. He’d do it with the same concentration as he applied to Will’s drawing. Here, Hannibal might tilt the younger man’s stubborn mandible into the light to inspect him more intimately. Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t be able to fight the temptation to use his thumb to press down into the hollow of Will’s cheek. His touch would be gentle, but it would also be unyielding, searching the imprints of Will’s teeth under his skin. 

Will’s not sure what they would feel like to him. 

In Will’s mouth, they feel restless. He’s not sure if Hannibal could caress the intensity of the feeling away. He’s not sure what could allay this. It’s so strong, it’s unbearable.

“But, it’s not just that,” Will persists. “Before Hell, when he was imprisoned and dying, Ugolino’s children begged him to eat them. They were starving and wanted him to end his agony and their own. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘the hunger had more power than sorrow over me’. But, it’s never clear what that power was. Whether he actually consumed those he loved, or he perished from starvation himself.”

Will recognizes the moment Hannibal’s goading redirects into another path, more open, more reciprocal. He’s no longer leading. He’s curious. “In Carpeaux’s famous sculpture,” Hannibal adds thoughtfully, “he bites his own fingers, but he doesn’t look at his children.”

“Maybe,” Will thinks aloud—his reasoning is unformed now, not like the lure he’d set out in the stream— “with his loves and his enemies, gnawing gave him power.”

“Not to destroy.”

“No… power against the most overwhelming of hungers and sorrows.”

“A gnawing pain,” Hannibal says, curious, but more now, something other. “Aching.”

_Could he feel the daily stab of hunger and find nourishment at the sight of his beloved?_

_And could his beloved ache for him as well?_

There’s a catch in Will’s throat. “Yes,” he says. “Aching. For someone and something.”

“Tell me, Will.” Hannibal pauses. “Is to chew in Dante then as much a form of violence as it is a form of love?”

_“Love?”_

That’s… the other man— the stranger— _Signore_ Albizzi’s— voice. 

Will had forgotten he was there.

“ _Certamente no!_ ” the stranger quips. “Count Ugolino couldn’t have _loved_ the archbishop. He betrayed him!”

It takes a moment for Will to process the man’s presence, let alone his words.

Hannibal immediately addresses the interruption. Were it not for his decorous tone, Will could almost imagine he was impatient, dismissive of this outsider volunteering an opinion. “The archbishop was an enemy, but he was also a friend. He is certainly the object of Ugolino’s passions, maybe even obsession.” Even though he’s talking to _Signore_ Albizzi— well, supposed to be— Hannibal’s gaze remains on Will. “So thoughts of the other man won’t leave, so Ugolino’s teeth don’t leave the other man’s skull.”

“To long for, to desire for, and to ache for,” Will says, “is to be in a state of becoming. One’s desire is transformed with either reciprocity or rejection.”

Will’s eyes don’t leave Hannibal’s. And Hannibal’s, not once, do they leave Will.

“If one side of love is breaking down the other’s heart, _cor ardendo_ , in one’s stomach,” says Will, “why can’t it also be breaking down the object of one’s fixation between one’s teeth?”

 _XXII. Gnawing_. Hannibal.

“ _Bravo_!” spews an ugly cry.

Though Hannibal has found _Signore_ Albizzi amusing in their previous interactions, the other man is now striking him as incredibly _rude._

Hannibal experiences and conceals his usual reactions to such behavior, as he is wont to do in many scenarios. But, he feels something else, too. A novel response. Part of him almost welcomes the rudeness, if such a thing were possible, because _Signore_ Albizzi’s interruption provides Hannibal an almost imperceptible window to recover from Will’s words and all that they evoke in him.

Accepting rudeness is unheard of for Hannibal, or at least it was before Will. This is proving to be the rule rather than the exception to his and Will’s relationship, if present circumstances are indicative. 

Will looks far less willing to indulge _Signore_ Albizzi. The older man claps a hand on Will’s back, and though the younger holds himself perfectly still, Hannibal senses that he wants nothing more than to thrust away the other’s admiring and patronizing appendage.

Hannibal, of course, wants to do much more than that.

Well, he’s reassured that most rudeness still arouses familiar responses in him.

“ _Meraviglioso_!” _Signore_ Albizzi cries. “You are an American student of the Palazzo Capponi, _Signore_?”

The older man apparently sees no disconnect between his joy and their conversation’s contents about rending flesh with incisors and violent, violating passion. Of course, the most civilized of swine are trained and train themselves to disconnect their pleasure from their carnage. Farmers think it will spoil the flavor of the meat. Hannibal enjoys all of it in swirling concert. For Will, both are so close to the surface that Hannibal can smell the disdain and suppression of violent action clearly on the younger man’s flesh.

“No,” says Will.

Will gravitates close enough to Hannibal that the doctor can feel his warmth, but he keeps enough distance so that the Albizzi’s recognize no… _intimacy_ between them.

“No? Well,” _Signore_ Albizzi smiles at Hannibal, “tonight’s _Studiolo_ has many brilliant young men among them.”

“When we first met _Dottore_ Lecter, we were so surprised he also does not specialize in classical studies,” _Signora_ Albizzi says to Will. She is confused, but Will’s intellect and attention to Florentine arts have endeared him to her.

And it is plain to her that Will holds Hannibal’s high regard. Hannibal has no plans to camouflage that, even if none can fathom the nature of Hannibal’s regard and what he hopes to nurture in the younger man.

“Doctor Lecter follows several trains of thought at once, without distraction from any.” Will levels a look at Hannibal. “One of the trains... is always for his own amusement.”

Dearest Will.

_Who is hunting whom?_

“His thoughts are certainly amusing. And I will not deny his language is... admirable. For a _straniero_.”

Will stiffens just a bit by Hannibal’s side, and Hannibal—

_Well._

“Ah, _Signore_ Sogliato!” Albizzi shakes hands with a man— older than Will but younger than Hannibal— who carries himself leisurely over to their group. _Signore_ Sogliato’s dark hair is oiled flat, his eyes half-lidded and contemptuous. Beneath the expensive fragrance and musty odor of library tomes, Hannibal can scent the zest of pride and the piquancy of anger. 

It is similar to the citrus notes Hannibal tastes in his meat that has gone frightened into the slaughter. 

_Signore_ Albizzi smiles and motions widely. “ _Signore_ Sogliato is another of our impressive young minds tonight. Soon enough, he will be a _professore_ at the Palazzo Capponi.”

Sogliato greets neither Hannibal nor Will, and Hannibal wonders which offends the other’s sensibilities more keenly: Hannibal’s obvious grandeur, or Will’s lack of it.

The snobbery appears not to surprise Will. He counters Sogliato with an obviously disinterested glance. Still, Hannibal knows Will is penetrating Sogliato’s refined exterior to sift through the other man’s thoughts, the only glints of gold in a mound of veritable grit and sand. This man makes it all too easy for Will. He thinks he wields his disdain like an axe to fell his enemies when it is really the open wound for Will to excavate all the way to the swine’s ugly but more appetizing core.

“I’d love to _pick_ your brains, _Signore_ Sogliato,” says Hannibal with honest enthusiasm. 

The image comes to Hannibal clearly. He thinks he’d do it over a meal with equally self-inflicted, fatal significance. Perhaps Punch Romaine, the last dessert for doomed passengers aboard the _Titanic_. 

“What were your impressions of the curator’s talk?” Hannibal asks.

The oily creature smirks. “Like anybody paying attention, I was very impressed.”

The man weaves Italian and English into a close-reading of the absence of warmth and love and light in the ice at the pit of Lucifer’s hell. He has obviously impressed the _Studiolo_ before, Hannibal thinks, though perhaps they also embrace the opportunity Sogliato affords them to unleash their venom like the nest of snakes they long to be. Or, maybe, they set their words upon each other like gladiators, hoping that the metaphorical bludgeoning will nevertheless result in real head trauma for their foe. It is much easier to scale up the academic ladder when one is unobstructed.

Hannibal finds Will’s description of his thought process quite apt. Now, however, he believes that multiple trains— one paying full-attention to Sogliato’s argument, and the other imagining cleaving apart his flesh and feeding him to the Albizzis— are all converging into the singular track of amusement.

“Perhaps most importantly, Dante reminds us that sin is an emptying thing,” Sogliato concludes.

“Fascinating,” Hannibal says. “Emptying the body of the sinner.”

Yes, Hannibal knows a lot about that. It is no loss for the unworthy to be divested of their only worthwhile components.

How strange that he and Sogliato should be in full agreement.

“Judas, the vilest of Dante’s sinners, undergoes the same treatment before he ends up in Lucifer’s maws,” Hannibal says. “On the doors of the Benevento Cathedral, Judas hangs with his bowels falling out, just as Saint Luke, the physician, described him in the Acts of the Apostles. In another image, he hangs and his flesh is beset by Harpies; and he's depicted by your own Giotto again with pendant viscera.”

To recreate such a work would be stunning: a pale body hollowed out at the abdomen, from whence glossy vermillion and mauve streams like the ornaments on a chandelier. 

“Hanging and disembowelment isn’t just for any sin, though,” remarks Will.

If Sogliato’s patience has been tested by Hannibal, it is nothing compared to Will. Here, a poor, informally-dressed American, one even younger than he is, talks to him like he could have something to add. Sogliato’s odor is rank and positively incensed.

Will seems to have predicted such a reaction, and though he doesn’t smile, Hannibal pictures the sharp edge of his lip cutting through his handsome face in victorious rise.

“Avarice.” Will draws his syllables long and low. “Personal gain. Judas sold his salvation away for thirty pieces of silver.”

Yes, he has found something inside Sogliato, and Hannibal dissects Will’s language: this well-bred and well-fattened pig has drunk deeply from the springs of Florentine high-culture because they are located right in his grounds. Like many of its members, he most likely has family embedded throughout the _Studiolo_ , those who used their connections to work their kin into places where others were cut out. If Sogliato defends his curator’s words, it’s not out of impassioned appeal but instead political leveraging. Sogliato, proud and cunning, spins beautiful, compelling threads for the _Studiolo_ , if it means he can inch further up the web where the spider most lucratively feeds.

“Greed and hanging are linked,” Will goes on, adopting the cool tones of a _professore_. “Judas' surname, Iscariot, means `price,' but it also comes from the Hebrew ‘from suffocation.’ Judas always wants more, and that leaves him with nothing. Traitor and self-betrayer. Emptied of breath, organs and virtue.”

“Greed, hanging, and self-destruction,” Hannibal acquiesces, because he knows Will’s mind and words will only ever hook into very deliberate points of their prey.

The look Will gives Hannibal is conspiratorial, almost as if he is inviting Hannibal to… reach inside him and share in Will’s devastating insights. 

What a dangerous prospect.

Hannibal cannot imagine anything he wants _more_.

“Greed counts as self-destruction as much as hanging,” Hannibal concludes. “‘ _Io fei gibetto a me de Ie mie case_ ’: ‘I made my own house be my gallows.’”

Will’s grin is not so indiscernible now, and Hannibal wants to pull the taste of it from his lips and teeth.

It occurs to him then that Will has not only been attempting to goad the good Sogliato into his snare. 

Once Hannibal summoned images of mangled flesh and organs prized from bodily recesses, Will only needed to coax the other man further, dangling greed and pride— like candy-glazed, intestinal morsels— as motives for Hannibal to deliver delightful torment onto his prey.

 _Dear, dear Will_. 

Throughout their re-encounter, Hannibal might have been able to engineer moments that excited Will’s caution, his brashness, his epiphanies, and his resistant return to the oblique rules of their sport. However, he ultimately lacks the same empathic insight into the nuances of Will’s emotions and what he intends to do with Hannibal _now_. 

_—hunt, love, catch, join, fear, know, kill, claim_ — _?_

Part of him protests all that Will might have gleaned unwittingly from Hannibal in their limited interaction. Another side of Hannibal marvels at Will’s unique capabilities. He has demonstrated the surface of his comprehensions of Hannibal, and they exceed other self-professed experts, opponents, friends, and loved ones in Hannibal life. Yet, they are just that—the surface. What Will chooses to make known, what Hannibal allows him to experience, and what Hannibal in the capacity of polite company can draw out of him. 

What if he could draw out _more_?

With debates that span every famed, unholy site in Florence’s past, present, and future and encompassed the whole of Hannibal’s library?

With appeals to Will’s sensorial pleasures in food and art and beauty and sex?

With the visceral unmaking of Will’s glorious form?

 _Does Will ally himself with the noble cause of the_ _questura_ is a rote question that posits itself to Hannibal, of course… but it is the one he entertains the least concern and interest therein. 

Rather than align himself with the agendas of a tactician, Hannibal identifies more strongly with the manipulations and revealing artifices of a playwright.

Will, therefore, is not Hannibal’s foe to vanquish.

He is Hannibal’s muse and work of art, all at once. 

He is the actor in Hannibal’s designs, one whom he will not permit to blindly follow the heroic parabola and cyclical model, notwithstanding their symmetrical allure. 

There is more potential in Will yet in his ruptures, rending, assemblage, and breakage. 

Is that not the aim, after all, of Hannibal’s art?

Will may see Hannibal as his enemy to the inviolability of the law, and that’s why he pursues _Il Mostro_. And he may have other purposes entirely. Does Will even know himself? Clever though Will is, Hannibal thinks not. For, can he not see that in exciting death upon another of _Il Mostro’s_ victims, the younger man only departs that much more from the dwindling shores of his own morality? 

When the salon dies down, and the Albizzis withdraw to the secure sophistication of their homes, and Sogliato does the same— with Hannibal’s plans to invite him to dinner in the not too distant future— then Will and Hannibal exit Forte di Belvedere. 

Will does not rejoin his class. He falls easily into step at Hannibal’s side, like he has always done. There may be purposeful vigilance in his glances and gate, but Will has always exhibited an abundance of mistrust. Perhaps Hannibal has earned it now. Perhaps Will has always had an inkling of the depravity Hannibal was capable of, like Will has always been receptive and resistant to the darkness and deviations of the minds around him.

Always on edge from his own worst instincts.

Now, Will seems dogged in his pursuit. 

Like always, Hannibal decides to take Will on a less direct path. They arrive at the dark, shuttered grounds of the Boboli gardens on the fort’s perimeter. Overhanging foliage paints the garden with blues and purples, casting deep shadows with flickers of moonlight that pierce through the arches of holm oaks and chestnut trees winding over allées. Hannibal is glad that no ugly street lamps have infringed this attempt at cloistered wilderness. Usually, it only needs the illumination of daylight. 

A wrought-iron gate guards the entrance, closing it for the night. 

Will displays no obvious signs of discomfort being in this barely-lit, abandoned space. He merely watches Hannibal, and then demonstrates surprise when Hannibal produces a key for the passage.

Hannibal slides the key into its slot. “I’ve become acquainted with the grounds-keepers during sessions sketching here,” Hannibal explains. “When I expressed a desire to draw the sculptures under starker lighting conditions, they very graciously offered me after-hours access.”

The metal wails, and the bolt tumbles open.

“Why am I not surprised?” Will says wryly. “You have networks everywhere, don’t you? In places high and low.”

There’s calculation when he says this, but no impending strategy, no anxiety. 

“One should not make such distinctions in forming companionships,” says Hannibal. “It would be discourteous. And discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”

When the gates part, Will overtakes Hannibal and follows the path through the garden. It’s barely lighter than the surrounding greenery, and the statues Will passes are the same, hints of paleness. Hannibal follows the younger man beneath the tunnels of trees, all over-saturated verdancy, all shadow. 

“Well...” says Will, maintaining a distance between him and Hannibal that the doctor would have to move swiftly and decidedly to cross. 

Hannibal mildly wonders, if Will were to attack him or defend himself, what would he use to his advantage? His fists, his boots, his teeth, his figure camouflaged in the garden’s shadowy recesses? 

Or would he draw a knife, flickering silver in the moonlight before he sought to sink it into Hannibal’s flesh?

“...What are you going to with me, then, Hannibal?”

Hannibal muses over how he would respond. In a manner where he can feel all of Will’s body as life and death courses violently through him, Hannibal surmises, because he cannot envision Will slipping peaceably into death.

It would be such a dull end.

“What _am_ I going to do with you, Will?” 

Will turns a corner in the labyrinth of trees, and Hannibal maneuvers around the twisted trunks. Gliding through the slim gaps in the evergreen shrubbery, Hannibal traces the slope of Will’s shoulders under his fingertips before the younger man turns on his heels, orbiting just around the doctor, before retreating again under further archways. 

“Did you know that these are called _la Cerchiata_ , Will?”

From under such a bow of gnarled darkness, Hannibal can discern the brightness of Will’s eyes. He blinks, twisting his head, but the mere flicker gives enough direction for Hannibal to cross over silvery pathways and pass his hand this time over the dip in Will’s lower back, the valley of his waist. 

Hannibal feels Will shiver under his touch, and he smells the feverishness of fear, physical exertion, _wanting_ —

Hannibal withdraws his hand, allowing Will to complete his motion beyond the trees, outside of Hannibal’s grasp. But he senses Will pause as he does so. The bright of his eyes blinks again, on and off like fireflies. 

“They’re derived from the medieval idea of wilderness,” Hannibal explains, walking deliberately, measuredly. In the midst of his procession, he starts projecting another posture: his shoulders rise, arching with the muscles in his neck, his arms limber but flexed. Not only does the stance produce the illusion of Hannibal’s increased height and vastness—

It also gives every appearance of the predator.

Will responds, not hastily but eventually surging through the thicket, at moments with clamor and then noiselessly. 

_Now_ Hannibal can hear the whisper of his breath.

“It adheres to the beliefs,” says Hannibal, stepping through the dark and tangled branches, “that structures created by man must also reflect the forms of nature itself.” 

Will lacks Hannibal’s awareness of the layout of the garden. He knows the limits of the overhanging forest, where dense brush gives way to open fields. 

The telltale deepening of Will’s silhouette indicates that they’ve reached the boundaries of the growth. Before Will has gotten too far at the edge of the maze, Hannibal loops his fingers around Will’s wrist, turning the younger man so they are face to face. 

Though mostly in shadow, Hannibal sees the white and startled blue of Will’s wide eyes, and as he thumbs the pulse in his wrist, he feels the rapid beat. Will’s sweat is briny, eroding the mellow night air, corrosive as sea water. 

Will doesn’t try to free himself or fight Hannibal, however. He allows Hannibal to walk him backward into the moonlight of the courtyard, stumbling once, and gasping sharply when he nearly falls and Hannibal steadies him with one hand pressed against Will’s chest and the other firmly wrapped around Will’s wrist. 

“Intriguing, isn’t it?” says Hannibal, bending over the younger man and drinking in the scents— the sounds— the sights. “Even though man excels at artifice—” he can nearly taste him “—he is also compelled to be true to his more primal instincts.”

Hannibal crawls his fingers up Will’s wrist and holds Will’s hand in his own, guiding the other down the waist of his tuxedo. Will takes shaky purchase. 

Then, hands clasped, free palms resting on breast and hip, Hannibal gracefully turns Will once, and twice, and a third time. Again and again, he leads him in a series of long, meandering loops. The dense forest surroundings gradually give way to gleaming fountains and spectral bouquets. 

They glide across the courtyard to a constant rhythm and several wide rivulets while Will stares in mute disbelief.

When Hannibal attempts to draw Will gracefully to him, Will suddenly buries his heels in the earth. After the slightest pause, he tugs the other man into his range, forceful and graceless, before he leaps away, hurtling them both farther across the courtyard, their fingers still interlocked. Hannibal attempts to steer them, grasping Will more firmly, but every time he coaxes their movements into some semblance of precision, Will reacts with a violent pull. A catch. A release.

On and on, over and over again.

“Reaching a bit, don’t you think, Hannibal?” Will says finally, his voice producing one beautiful break. “Waltzing is definitely not in my primal nature.” A leer splits the shroud of his expressionlessness. “I said it before— not in Louisiana, and not in Florence.”

“Is that a complaint, Will?” Hannibal asks. “Or an invitation?” 

With a flick of his wrist, Hannibal draws Will away with one, two, three twirls of the younger man’s body. 

Will is bewildered, furious, enraptured. “Did you just… spin me?” His fingers tighten in Hannibal’s.

Hannibal flashes his teeth. “Why, yes. I suppose I did. I think I can understand your attraction to fishing, now. Though I find it much more enjoyable to have you dangling from my fingers.”

Will’s laughter cuts through the air before it is lost in a rush of movement. In a moment, Will is leaning into Hannibal so close their lips could almost touch, and then he bodily drags them another direction. It’s like they share the same ligature of muscles from their wrists up their arms through their shoulders, for when Will pulls him one way, Hannibal follows, and when Hannibal pulls him another direction, Will is right beside him. Will’s feet cut across the dewy lawn in sharp, zig-zagging patterns, but Hannibal isn’t lost. He swerves around Will’s rapid steps, encircling Will to lead him further down the landscape. Will unfolds from Hannibal’s movements to be the one pulling him in and pushing him away and then fiercely bringing him towards Will again. 

Hannibal has to quickly unlock the pond and island of Vasca dell'Isola before they tumble into the gates. Once within, both men control their movements only that much more to get across the bridge and over the moat. They are no less forceful, however, with their dynamic choreography. Will shoves as if to push Hannibal over the edge, and then he hooks a heel around Hannibal’s ankle, drawing him back. Hannibal envelops him.

Their hands have moved from being linked at the fingers to raking up each other’s forearms, wrenching each other’s shoulders. 

They make it half circle around the Fountain of Oceanus before Hannibal and Will crash together, tongues and groping limbs and teeth.

Their panting is already harsh as they suck and bite, still in the thralls of their promenade. Hannibal tastes the sour-bitterness of resentment and haunting on Will’s tongue. 

What flavors does Will tastes on him?

Certainly heat— ambivalent, escalating heat.

They’re coming toward the edge of the island. Will licks into Hannibal’s mouth, pushes, and Hannibal leans back against a section of the stone balustrade, jumping on it as Will kisses him harder, angrily. Hannibal has to squeeze the bones in Will’s fingers when he attempts to rip his vest open, and Will retaliates by biting his lip so Hannibal tastes copper.

When he’s carved enough inflamed grooves down Hannibal's throat and chest and stomach— marks that Hannibal anticipates will linger— Will’s palms slide over Hannibal’s thighs, hot as embers through the fabric of his trousers. The younger man opens Hannibal’s belt and undoes his zipper. Hannibal’s hands slide down Will’s body to reciprocate, delaying to trace patterns on Will’s skin that make him shudder and bite and groan.

Will’s mouth finally detaches from Hannibal’s with a wet, indecent pop— blood shines on the edge of his lips— and his irises are dark. The Atlantic swallowed in the eye of a hurricane. Without breaking eye contact, he eases Hannibal’s trousers lower, exposing his bare skin to the night air. Will’s fingers follow the ridge of the other man’s hip bone down, down, down. As far down as he can go. 

He stares when Hannibal makes no move to stop him. Only parts his thighs wider for Will’s easy access.

There’s confusion, suspicion, and aggravation emanating from Will’s nails digging into Hannibal’s skin, but his limbs also tremble with lust.

“I don’t suppose you mind if I,” says Will, “get… creative?” 

“I especially support creative enterprises.”

If Will has concerns about what Hannibal plans to do next, he ignores them and latches their lips together once more before he falls onto his knees. Then, he applies his mouth to Hannibal’s hardness. Hannibal relishes the slick softness of his tongue, and the warning scrape of his teeth. 

In no time at all Will migrates lower, far lower— and much, much deeper, burrowing inside. His fingers are just as dexterous and unrelenting as his tongue. They open and search and soothe and excite. Will’s mouth pulls and plunges, feasting on Hannibal’s inner flesh. 

This is perhaps what it feels like to be a piece of fruit that Will loosens open before consuming completely from the inside out. First, he pries apart the tough outer layers with his skillful digits, and then he spears the delicate interior apart with his tongue. 

Hannibal decides not to hold back as he digs his fingers into the other man’s hair. He’s always enjoyed its silken touch, the luxuriant mass. He grabs as much of the pleasurable thing as he can and pulls with his fist. Will groans inside Hannibal, his tongue stroking him with tunneling, burning lashes, and Hannibal pants savagely into the cool air. 

“Clever, ingenious boy,” he says, and that’s all it takes for the younger man to remove himself and rise to his feet. He lifts one of Hannibal’s knees up into the corner of his elbow. Then, without a pause, Will drives himself into Hannibal. 

He’s unceasing heat and fullness and pressure. 

He’s in completely with one ruthless, exquisite stroke.

And he doesn’t wait for Hannibal to adjust. Hannibal thinks Will would be encouraged if he got him to bleed. 

They’re immediately loud, animated. They pant, grunt, and moan as Hannibal links his ankles around Will’s back, urging him closer, deeper, harder. There is no distance between Hannibal’s body and Will’s, and any suggestion of it is immediately eliminated when Will snaps his pelvis forward. Will curses and growls Hannibal’s name in the same breath, rolling his hips, jolting Hannibal against them. Hannibal does not easily reach the point of breathless, but Will breaks his gasps consistently by angling into Hannibal’s sensitivity and pleasure, sucking the jump in his artery, and then he seals their lips sloppily together.

Hannibal can feel Will’s smile and his teeth.

“Will, Will, Will,” he breathes, low, again and again and again. He tightens the fingers of one hand around the ledge of the balustrade when the force of Will’s thrusts threatens to throw him over. Will half-catches him with bruising fingers buried in Hannibal’s buttock, but he makes Hannibal tense and do the remaining work to keep himself aloft. 

“ _Hannibal_ ,” Will growls against his mouth as Hannibal tightens the fist in Will’s hair, arching his head momentarily to lick and bite Will’s throat. 

Will wrests control back almost immediately, pressing their faces into a wounding kiss. 

Hannibal repeats it all the same— _WillWillWill_ — and the way Will’s entire body stiffens, Hannibal suspects that it is almost too much to hear the constant invocation of his pleasure, his pain, and Will’s name.

He keeps Hannibal’s leg pinned in the bend of his elbow, and then he angles it up almost over his shoulder. Will lets out a sound of surprise and then the filthiest exclamations at the revelation of Hannibal’s flexibility. 

Hannibal feels the gratifying and punishing effects of Will’s arousal— and the arm that lifts and searches the jumping muscles of Hannibal’s torso, tracing the ridges and curves with sly fingers— and opens Hannibal up even more, giving Will greater passage into the doctor’s depths. 

The onslaught of sensation is causing a searing heat to build up in Hannibal’s lungs. He can’t remember the last time he experienced this quality of delicious, destructive, dismantling strain. He delights in the anger that motivates Will to push Hannibal to his limits, and then the pleasure when Will finds Hannibal malleable, receptive, responding. 

“Dear, dear Will,” Hannibal pants. “What will I do… with you?” 

Will laughs and groans, sinking deeper inside the other man and not drawing back an inch. “I think what you should be asking is… what will _I_ do with _you_?” 

They have fleeting moments when their mouths separate, when the pleasure soars too high and they can’t _breathe_ , before they swallow each other up again. 

The pressure builds and accelerates toward imminent release. Hannibal’s. Will’s. Their heaving, shallow breaths and their taut limbs. The muscles inside Hannibal constrict. Will grips him with a ragged howl and doesn’t let up. Doesn’t let go.

Clamping his thighs and abdominal muscles around Will— a vicious, fractured groan is torn from the younger man’s throat— Hannibal smiles against Will’s lips before he uses his legs to wrench the other’s hardness sharply out of him and away.

Will’s expression is incredible and matchless. For a heady moment, Hannibal think he’s going to send them both over the siding and into the water. Will does leap with that same impassioned energy as he grabs Hannibal’s arm and shoulder. He swiftly maneuvers him— with the aid of Hannibal’s curiosity and breathlessness— so that Hannibal is flipped over onto his stomach. He’s forced to grab the balustrade as he leans over it with his chest. 

And then Will fucks him brutally from behind. 

The shout that is ripped from Hannibal is somewhere between a laugh and a moan. 

Yes, Will is oh so clever. 

He presses Hannibal down inch by inch. 

He doesn’t give him the chance to move at all. 

Their gasps are rough, frenzied, stuttered. Will’s teeth are on Hannibal’s neck. Hannibal’s mouthing Will’s name into the dark. 

When Will is either more confident that Hannibal won’t move away again, or he’s just too far gone to consider it, one of his hands creeps with unbearable slowness up Hannibal’s body. His palm circles Hannibal’s groin and stomach to skim over his chest and onto his sternum. Hannibal wonders if the touch is as sensitive to Will’s fingers as it is to Hannibal’s stimulated skin. 

Then, Will’s hand travels up the firm, quivering column of Hannibal’s throat to gently loosen the other man’s jaw. He slips his fingers between Hannibal’s lips, between the blades of his teeth.

It’s not a gesture of trust, nor a dare, nor a signal of dominance.

It’s another way Will is resolved to make his way inside Hannibal. He feels out the flickering motions of Hannibal’s tongue and coaxes the other man to suck his fingers, softly and then ravenously. They excite every nerve and sensory receptor in Hannibal’s mouth.

When the pleasure-pain becomes white and blinding, and Hannibal comes around Will, he draws blood. Will’s throbbing fingers don’t pull away.

In fact, it seems to push the younger man to his breaking point, too. Resonating with Will’s release, as well as tasting his blood on his tongue, makes Hannibal seize harder and more completely. He shudders, almost voiceless, as he clutches the rails to keep from toppling down. Will holds him just as intensely, first through the shockwaves of his own orgasm, and then to keep Hannibal from falling over the edge. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, if I haven't exhausted ya'll enough with an in-depth and riveting analysis of chewing... which is actually mentioned in Harris' Hannibal novel! This is that same, novel-canon salon. Just decided to elaborate here.
> 
> And bringing back the show's unfortunate Albizzi couple and foolish Sogliato. How long will he survive? To be seen...
> 
> Will and Hannibal quote copiously from Plato's Allegory of the Cave here, which is a parable about entering into the radiance of knowledge from societal blindness, and then having to return to the dark to be killed for one's insights, which the blind prisoners think of as infirmity and danger. This is line for line the final outcome of the parable:
> 
> Socrates (the master): and if they can get hold of this person who takes it in hand to free them from their chains and to lead them up, and if they could kill him, would they not actually kill him?
> 
> Glaucon (Socrates' student): they certainly will.
> 
> It seemed all too fitting for this series. 
> 
> Also, the canto about Lucifer: "and, despite that, raised his brows at his maker, one can understand how every sorrow has its place in him." That raising his brows at his maker bit is DEFINITELY Will. Hugh Dancy does it SO much and marvelously in the show. I only emulate it here.
> 
> I'd like to conclude with an admission that this chapter is deliberately ambiguous about Hannibal and Will's plans and feelings for each other, as I believe season 2 to be. And their contradictory, lonely characters at large.
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.
> 
> Will follow up tomorrow, I promise!


	12. Gallows/Fireflies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part II of this weekend's updates!
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. I hope you enjoy.

_XXIII. Gibetto/Gallows_. Will.

Will… really needs to stop. 

He needs somebody or something to stop him, but the only presences sharing the dusky stage of the courtyard with him and Hannibal are figures of stone.

Distantly, immaterially, compared to the warmth of Hannibal’s skin and the silken wet of his mouth, the statues remind Will of his monster’s beloved operas: for Hannibal lies practically flat on his back against the granite railing, hooking an arm around Will’s neck to draw him deeper, and Will climbs up there with him, refusing to detach himself, and the statues are compelled to watch the scene unfold. Transfixed, their gray jaws fall open, suspended mid-chorus or mid-wail.

The burgeoning exhibitionist streak should concern Will. Maybe, it does. Will’s never had cravings of this nature before, that’s for damned sure. As far as unlawful behavior goes, however, this transgression has far less bearing on him than the transgressor whom Will continues to search with his tongue, and who responds in ravenous turn… 

He tastes _good_ —

Bitter, salty, sweet, metallic… 

He feels _pain_ , withdrawing his fingers from Hannibal’s lips and curling them into a stinging, bloody fist.

“So,” Will pants. He rubs his knuckles on his jeans. The broken skin flares sharply; it dwindles to a muted ache. Will's clothes will probably stain. “Have any creative methods for getting cleaned up?”

Hannibal finally loosens his fingers from Will’s hair and volunteers his handkerchiefs to the cause of making them a little more modest, hopeless though it may be. The water’s too dark to catch his reflection, so Will clasps his buckle, straightens the crumpled mess of his collar, and he doesn’t hazard a guess as to how he appears.

Hannibal is immaculate. Not a hair is out of place, nor are there any spots of blood or pearls of spent that Will can distinguish in the absence of light. 

It’s almost too much. Will wants to fuck him all over again. 

Hannibal appears to sense Will’s instincts and very conscientiously lingers as he finishes the last of his buttons. 

_No, no._

“We ought to go before you lose all your garden privileges,” says Will gruffly.

Hannibal seals the front of his suit. “I must admit, right now it would not be a great loss.” 

In their departure, spare light begins to break through the net of boughs and indicates the upcoming city limits. They’d been so far away from the rest of humankind, Will thinks. The artificial light is glaringly wrong: an intrusion. Though, even in its presence, the pavement fades into the grass, but that’s not the only reason Will would barely avoid becoming lost if he were to go back the way he came. 

He hadn’t paid attention to the path as he climbed and crouched and fled through the trees, Hannibal on his heels. He couldn’t hear Hannibal breathe. All he heard was the perpetual susurrus of the garden, branches creaking, grass rippling, and leaves whispering soft as green serpent-tongues. 

What Will remembers was the urgency, the thrill, the need to _move, move,_ that he couldn’t _stay_ that way—

—more than he’d ever felt before. But the intensity wasn’t the worst. 

What disturbed him was the familiarity. Not that he was running just from _Il Mostro_ : that Will was escaping a companion and limitless darkness. Hannibal surpassed the usual boundaries, broke them gladly, and facilitated the winsome, unbounded dark across the threshold of Will’s sanity that much more, because it _was_ him, no different from the shadows he bled.

Will’s torn, wishing he’d run farther or hidden himself more completely or faced what haunted him and _exposed broken knew_ it _._

He’s adamant that he shouldn’t have entered that mockery of a dance and coupling. 

Sure, he’s employing the novel and non-recommended strategy of courting the monster while attempting to simultaneously find shelter. Fishing, after all, has taught Will more than criminal analyses. 

But both mostly likely caution against confounding heart-stopping horror with heart-pounding _delight_. 

Light bursts into Will’s vision. Likely the hallucinogenic results of an absurd and wretched mix of chasing, reveling and fucking. A particularly cruel illusion, Will thinks, when the light encircles Hannibal.

Then it crawls over Will’s face, and he realizes:

“Fireflies. Didn’t think they’d be in season yet.” 

“In Florence, they start appearing in the late spring and early summer, though they’re more prevalent in the countryside,” says Hannibal.

The insects flash against a grotto depicting the likenesses of Adam and Eve, whose expressions are lost in their exile from paradise. 

The slight luminescence isn’t enough to reveal the exterior of the Pitti Palace any more clearly. The ribs of the building are severe and skeletal, the windows grim cutouts against the solid structure of glass and stone. 

The fireflies illuminate the final monument of the Boboli gardens, an immense grotto, barred and filled with stalactites and shells. Closest to the opening of the cavern, where heavy walls haven’t created too dense an umbra, Will detects marble figures emerging from the porphyry. 

Their limbs are contorted in the middle of their transformations between beast, earth, and man. 

Hannibal gently plucks a firefly from the sky. His face flashes with the green-yellow light before it is blanketed in dusk once more. 

“I kept cochlear gardens in Paris to attract fireflies,” Hannibal recalls once they exit the garden’s gates and resume Florence’s city roads. “Their larvae would devour many times their own body weight in snails. Fuel, to power the transformation into a delicate creature of such beauty.”

“You wouldn’t know it by looking at them,” says Will.

“Does the fact make them less beautiful?” Hannibal asks. 

“Beautiful? Maybe not. Harmless? Yes. Fireflies lead very brief lives, you know.”

“Better to live true to your nature for an instant than never to know it.”

“If we are what we eat, then what is our true nature?” Will asks. “Is it the unfortunate snail or the devouring firefly?”

“Do you suppose the snail is unfortunate, Will? They follow their nature as surely as those who eat them.” 

“One’s true nature is… complicated.” 

Tourists and locals surge around the two men, passing with bags and food. Hannibal still cuts a singular figure among them, and it’s not simply the black tux. How, Will wonders, does this crowd of Florentine pleasure-seekers see Hannibal? Do they view him with the same envy and awe of the pompous _Studiolo_ , or do they have different agendas and misperceptions? In their eyes, who are the men who stalk their streets?

And how do they see Will?

“The snail becomes the firefly... and the firefly becomes the snail. We all eat, and at some point we are all eaten,” Will says.

Hannibal appears to consider that. “It certainly confuses what many deem the natural order,” he says thoughtfully. “Eat or be eaten. Man strives to be the apex predator. Eating lesser creatures is how he gets his satisfaction.” 

Will chuckles tersely. “Yeah, well, he’ll have to get his satisfaction a different way.”

“How?”

“The privilege of choosing who eats him.”

Hannibal nods. “The privilege indeed. Did you cultivate your own bait for fishing, Will?”

“You mean do my bait get a choice?”

The Arno isn’t too far now. Its water is a sharp divide between Old Florence and the new. 

“I used live bait when I was a kid, mostly,” says Will. “It wasn’t anything fancy like a cochlear garden. Now, though, it’s just me and my lures in the streams. I make them myself.” 

“You prefer to fish with no other living thing between you and your target,” says Hannibal. “To cast your lure, then, is to cast an extension of yourself. You have the privilege of choosing who eats you.”

Maybe there's truth in that. Awful truth. 

But Will’s not divulging that bit of self-examination. He prefers to impart another: “And I choose who has the privilege of getting eaten by me in return."

Slowing, he smooths a hand over Hannibal’s shoulder and up to the older man’s cheek. It sits solid and cool and deceptively unmarred in Will's palm. Without stirring beneath Will’s fingers, Hannibal simply waits until he joins their lips. When he kisses Will back, he moves slowly. His motions avoid inflaming the barely-dry wounds on his lip, or Will doesn’t taste them. The kiss isn’t chaste, however. It can’t be, not when Hannibal’s mouth glides over his, caressing, with just enough friction, and Will feels the burn of his bloody fingers as they clutch his leg through his pocket and dig into denim and flesh. 

It’s easier to ground himself when Will and Hannibal separate and take the roads on the outskirts of the Arno. Will comments on the qualities of the various oceanic and river vessels. Hannibal listens closely, occasionally asking about the differences between different types of fishermen and the best boats for their catches.

A dinghy floats down the river. 

“There’s no light,” Will says, perplexed. “There’s no way they can see where they’re going.”

“Gondolas don’t typically ferry passengers at this hour.” Hannibal leans over to look.

That’s right: Will’s only ever seen those flimsy vessels in the middle of the day, floating lazily while tourists sip their _aperitifs_. There’s no figure standing to paddle this boat along. It’s barely moving at all, but there’s still something inside, like cargo, but also something that looks suspiciously like…

The guardrails are tall, but Will still propels himself over them. He skids down the steep elevation of the road, landing onto the gravel and long grasses of the narrow riverbank. He’s right: the boat’s not being propelled by any sailor. It’s barely carried along at all, swiveling like the needle on a stranded compass. Will can see only a little over the edge of the gondola’s hull, but what he sees is enough.

There, packed with bundles of resplendent, stained cloth, are the bodies of a man and a woman. They look almost like they’ve fallen asleep in their passage over the water, but they’re not sleeping. Stones lay over their eyes. Dark, gleaming, fierce blood streams from their chests, though the padding of their water-borne coffin prevents it from percolating into the Arno. They haven’t just been stabbed; their chests have been torn open. Will can see it, the glossy, pillaged musculature of their interiors and the fragments of white from the shattered bars of their rib cages.

“It appears we should contact _la polizia_.”

Will whips around, and Hannibal is standing at his shoulder. He hadn’t even heard him descend from the ledge. The other man doesn’t look ruffled from the activity at all or at the sight on the Arno’s newest travelers. It’s almost hard to distinguish Hannibal from the black of the rest of the night.

Will swallows. “Yeah.”

Hannibal retrieves his cellphone and makes the call. By the time the police arrive, a crowd of horrified onlookers have congregated by the guardrails around the road, peering over the side with gasps and exclamations. Will is impatiently digging his heels into the riverbank. He tries to discern what he can from this maddening distance to the crime scene, and then the police meet him at the edge of the water. They ask him questions in firm Italian and broken English. He tries to make out what they’re saying, but he’s half-watching as motorboats streak down the river from below the Ponte Vecchio and forensics begin to draw the gondola toward them. 

“We have been asked to go back with them to answer some questions,” Hannibal tells Will when he’s finished conversing with one of the officers. 

The other man does not look a bit inconvenienced. He’s amused. Will murmurs his affirmation. He understands the procedure, interrogating witnesses who first arrive at a crime scene and find the body. It’s standard, routine.

Still, it doesn’t make him less wary. 

Will also knows in theory what happens in a police station. But he’s never experienced it, waiting as officers, witnesses, and criminals pass here and there and the hours tick by. 

“Really, Hannibal?”

Hannibal smiles across from Will. “It seemed as good an opportunity as any,” he admits. He continues working on his drawing. His scalpel gleams in the artificial lights. If Will doesn’t move, it’s not to preserve the other man’s piece. He closes his eyes, wondering how Hannibal will represent him in this moment. If he will be able to convey all that Will is thinking.

Just as Will suspects, he and Hannibal are led into different rooms when their investigating officers finally want to speak with them. Will is both surprised and not surprised when the door opens, and Inspector Pazzi sits at the other side of the small table.

He looks similar to when Will saw him last. There’s a determined charge to his harrowed face. He’s a man, of course, searching for a revelation.

“ _Buona sera_ , _Signore_ Graham,” he greets in his usual wispy voice. “Fancy seeing you here tonight.”

“ _Buona sera, Commendatore_. I’d say it’s not too fancy seeing you here. After all,” Will cocks his brow, “it’s not the opera.”

Pazzi smiles. “No, I suppose it’s not.”

The Inspector opens a folder with photos and notes. Will sees the contents of the gondola more clearly now. The bodies are cradled between velvet cloth, casting nets and what appears to be sand and shells. Conches, scallops, dried seahorses, and the halved husks of clams and oysters are scattered around the corpses. They lay with their arms at their sides and palms turned open as grit flows through their fingers. In more detailed photos, Will realizes that what he thought were stones on the eyes are actually bleached and bony sand dollars.

The holes in the victims’ chests also have glass orbs inside, rising like bubbles.

“Their lungs have been removed,” says Will.

“Yes.” Pazzi doesn’t even look back at the photo. 

“Is this how they died?”

Pazzi pushes another photo of blood and brain matted in the victims’ hair. “Blunt force trauma to the back of the head.”

“Blows to the head? Then the organs were removed post-mortem.”

“Yes.”

“Were there any other signs of damage?”

Pazzi reveals another photo of the sand dollars replaced to reveal empty, scarlet eye sockets. 

“At what point were the eyes removed?” Will asks.

“The same as the lungs.”

Will thinks. “All brutalization of the body was done posthumously.”

Pazzi sips his _caffe,_ intrigued by Will’s more than civilian analyses. “Yes.”

It’s frustrating dealing with photos. Displaced from the bodies and crime scene like this, it’s harder for Will to try and imagine what it would be like in the killer’s head. He tries to reconstruct it from the flat, sparing visual evidence before him. He _thinks_ he can grasp some of the picture. 

“How did you come upon the bodies, _Signore_ Graham?”

Will has to pull back from the sensations and world of his imaginings. “I was… returning from Forte di Belvedere. My class was there for the evening.”

Pazzi’s hands don’t move on the table. “But you didn’t leave with your class.”

“No.”

“Were you returning to your accommodations?”

Will drums his fingers noiselessly on the edge of the table. “Not mine.”

“No?”

Will meets the Inspector’s eyes. “No. I was going back… with Hannibal.”

“Ah,” Pazzi says, but at least he’s not trying to sound like he doesn’t already know: it is merely the image that becomes clearer in his mind. The sketch that is ever more detailed and fully-formed. “ _Dottore Lecter_. _”_

“Yes.”

“Did you plan to meet?”

“Yes.”

“And you weren’t together throughout the day?”

“No,” says Will. “Only the evening.”

“I see,” Pazzi muses, and he might as well have told Will the time of death already: it happened earlier, maybe that morning or the night before, based on the fresh conditions of the bodies and their fluid blood. 

Pazzi doesn’t even ask if Will saw anybody suspicious at the river when the bodies floated his way. 

“You think this is _Il Mostro_ ,” Will tells the other man.

Pazzi doesn’t appear alarmed by Will’s insight. In fact, he welcomes it. “What do you know about _Il Mostro_ , _Signore_ Graham?”

Will shrugs. “Only what I read in the papers.” Pazzi’s face doesn’t change. “ _Il Mostro’s_ kills have a distinctive brutality and theatricality. He possesses in-depth anatomical or surgical knowledge. With it, he painstakingly transforms his victims and takes trophies from them.”

“ _Il Mostro_ has created images that stay in my mind,” Pazzi agrees.

“He’s not just killing,” Will goes on. “He’s... performing. His mutilations are extreme, but they also hide the true nature of his crimes. Every brutal choice has… elegance. Grace.”

A soft, buzzing noise comes from behind Pazzi’s bemused lips. “Like the _Primavera_.”

Will pauses. “Yes. Like a Botticelli painting.”

Pazzi flips through his notes, but he’s not reading them. “I have never heard someone describe _Il Mostro_ the way you do, _Signore_ Graham.” Pazzi speaks with obvious appreciation. “You know about killers. You have a gift of vision, even when to everyone else it is unclear.”

Will raises his shoulders. “Gift, curse.”

“What are you studying in America?”

Will gives this away slower, but still, he shares. “Criminology.”

Pazzi smiles broadly. “I see. You plan to go into law enforcement.”

“Something like that.”

“Good,” says Pazzi. “It will be good to have someone like you catching monsters there. I read up as much as I can about FBI methods. I am sad to say that my people are not so open to new ideas. They are afraid. The windows of the _questura_ laboratory are garlanded with garlic to keep out the evil spirits.”

Will reads the other man. “That can be difficult.”

Pazzi’s lips are still curved upward but they’re fatigued. “It can be. My city fears _Il Mostro_ , and they do not understand what I see. My hunt has let the crows peck at my heart. You have the mind of an investigator, _Signore_ Graham. Let me share with you what I know. _Il Mostro_ takes anatomical trophies, but he leaves no evidence. He’s careful. He will strike again, but his needs don’t force him to strike often. There are long periods where he doesn’t strike at all, making him harder to catch.”

Will glances at Pazzi’s mug, wishing he had some caffeine, too. Whiskey, preferably. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Men of the law have reputations to uphold. Let us... enjoy the honors of our trade by catching the monster.”

Will scoffs. _Reputations_ , huh? Is Pazzi offering Will the chance to redeem his image for whatever thrall he’s fallen under with Hannibal? Or maybe this is the chance to confess and gain penance for potentially being an accomplice to his crimes? Will thinks Pazzi’s still determining the nature of their involvement, but in either scenario, he plans to use Will for all he’s got. 

“You might catch this monster,” Will admits, pushing back against his chair, “but it won’t be the same one that you’re looking for.”

Pazzi’s gaze is a bit harder now, his hands firm. “You think _Il Mostro_ didn’t do this.”

 _I know._ Though it was hard to see through the shadows of the Arno, it’s clear to Will now. He points to the photos. “The killer managed to remove the lungs from the victims, but the work is sloppy, amateurish. This isn’t a man with _Il Mostro’s_ finesse. He’s not taking the organs for the same reasons, either. _Il Mostro’s_ dissections are to disgrace his victims. He takes away their organs because he believes they don’t deserve them. This killer’s doing it because he wants to save them.”

This is evidently a stretch for Pazzi, and he’s no doubt analyzing Will’s motivations, weighing them against the logic of his deductions. “He tries to save them by removing their lungs?”

Will groans. The photos still don’t offer him much, but he can trace the lingering impressions of the killer’s emotions and intentions. “Yes. This killer thinks his victims don’t need them. He’s filled them with something more valuable instead.” Will gestures to the highly polished crystals in the chest cavities. He points higher. “He’s placed coins on their eyes, too. The Ancient Egyptians did the same with their dead so they could gain passage to the afterlife. This killer’s given his deceased sand dollars, which some might consider currency to the underworld as well.”

Will leans back, closing his eyes to try and bring all the elements together, even if they’re just floating particles of insubstantial matter. “He wants... to elevate his victims. Because they're not good enough right now to gain entrance to wherever they need to be. _Il Mostro_ elevates his victims, too, but it’s because he has refined tastes, and ugliness isn’t something he desires seeing in his world.”

Pazzi is disarmed, Will can tell. He’s not sure whether to trust Will, but there is a resolve and adroitness to the younger man’s words that the Inspector cannot deny.

“The _questura_ think he is a true sociopath,” Pazzi shares, no longer trying to refer to any other killer, because he has a sole mission. “What do you think, _Signore_ Graham?”

Will grits his teeth. “That’s… harder,” for plenty of reasons, but the most objective are, “he has some of the characteristics of a sociopath. No remorse, no guilt. He’s proud of what he’s done, audacious about it. But, he won’t have any of the other marks. No trouble with the law, or erratic behavior. He’s highly controlled, skillful, and he doesn’t make mistakes. He’ll be almost impossible to see, not like other killers.”

Pazzi contemplates this as he rotates his pen between his fingers. “Not, you believe, like this one.”

Will laughs at that, though he probably shouldn’t. He really could use some caffeine or alcohol, because apparently whatever adrenaline he’d experienced at the crime scene has left his system and being interrogated by a chief inspector isn’t strong enough of a pick-me-up. 

“This kind of thing might amuse _Il Mostro_ ,” Will admits, “but he wouldn’t enjoy being identified with the creator of this work. It would offend him.”

Pazzi appears both frustrated and… fascinated by that. The rest of his discussion with Will is unremarkable, and eventually he escorts the younger man from the interrogation room back to the front of the station.

“ _Commendatore_ ,” Hannibal greets him, probably long done with answering his own questions. “ _Buona sera_. Or perhaps I should say, _buon giorno_.”

The clock reads almost four in the morning. No wonder Will’s so fucking tired, on top of everything else. 

“Thank you for your help, _Dottore_ ,” Pazzi says, nodding. “I hope it was not too much of an inconvenience.”

Hannibal smiles. “Not at all. It was quite sensational.” It is then that Hannibal uncrosses his legs and closes his sketchbook, packing it away in his satchel. 

Inspector Pazzi is watching him the entire time, especially his set of art supplies. “I am glad you found a way to pass the time.”

Hannibal moves to shake the other man’s hand, saying, “You know how much I enjoy drawing. _Ciao, Signore_.”

Pazzi doesn’t move from his spot as Hannibal and Will leave the station, only answering, “ _Ciao, Dottore. Signore Graham_.”

 _XXIV. Fireflies._ Hannibal.

When Hannibal and Will stir to waking later, it is a little past the afternoon. Strong light surges through Hannibal’s windows. At first Will yawns, stretches, and he almost climbs out into the sunshine on the terrace before he remembers that he’s only wearing his boxers. 

“Fuck.” 

Hannibal hands him an espresso in bed. 

The younger man’s waves have been tossed by dream-saturated sleep. When Will had jolted to waking at near hourly increments, Hannibal encircled Will’s back with his arms and drew him close. He and Will laid on their sides, pressed against each other, and they kissed, slowly and unhurriedly before their touches became fierce and demanding. That, in addition to the night terrors, did not make their sleep schedules any timelier.

“You mentioned drowning. Ferries and ocean water,” says Hannibal. “The crime scene.” 

Will laughs huskily. “Sometimes it’s hard to pull myself out once I’ve gotten inside a killer’s head.”

While the mechanics of Will’s empathy are very enchanting and his ruminations on death and violence equally so, Hannibal is less eager to hear about his agonized fascination with other, lesser beings. 

“I may have a solution for that. You could use a bath. It might be comforting.”

Will gulps down the rest of his drink. “So you’re saying I should try to forget about getting submerged in water by submerging myself in a tub?”

“I will go with you,” Hannibal says. 

Will’s eyes widen, and he answers, “That might help.”

Will does loosen up as he sinks into the bath, draping one arm over the coppery ledge to keep himself from slipping back into fleeting somnolence. Hannibal decides to inscribe this new scene into his memory palace. In this room, Hannibal would always find Will resting in the water, his body both pliant and restless. His skin would have gleaming beads of moisture clinging to every part of it, some trickling down over his lean muscles and into the crevices of his bent limbs. Steam would rise into Will’s face, but the flush of his cheeks would still be vibrant, as well as the strong, crimson hues of Will’s perfect mouth. Hannibal could draw it over and over again. 

As Hannibal lathers shampoo into his palms, he coaxes the younger man against him. Will raises an eyebrow and settles his back against Hannibal’s chest, and the other man runs his slick, fragrant hands through his wet hair. 

Will really is a feast for the senses. Without the aftershave, he smells delightful— clean and sharp. Hannibal pays close attention as he teases out the knots in Will’s scalp. They feel like satin, and he’s slow to entwine his fingers into the sumptuous spirals of each curl.

“That feels nice,” Will hums.

He keeps his eyes closed. Hannibal might think he’s falling asleep again, except his hand drifts from Hannibal’s inner thigh and knee to his ankle. Will lightly traces the musculature of the doctor’s calf and circles his fingertip around the outline of Hannibal’s ankle bone.

As Hannibal gently combs his nails from Will’s hairline down to the base of his skull, Will draws his hand around the other man’s neck. He lowers him against his lips. 

“You gonna offer to give me a shave as well?” Will asks when Hannibal traces the stubble around Will’s jaw.

The idea of holding a razor against Will’s throat _is_ very arousing. 

“Though I do enjoy getting you clean,” says Hannibal, “I also equally enjoy having you more rough and raw.”

Soon, they’re both sinking against each other and into the cloudy water. 

While Hannibal is curious about Will’s thoughts on the killer, he is glad the younger man isn’t too consumed by it. 

Hannibal’s more possessive than he would have originally thought.

He does get to learn more about the _questura’s_ thoughts once he and Will finally enter a cafe for a late lunch. 

They are certainly… uninspired.

Patrons swarm like moths to the glow of a small television screen. The shop-keeper is also distracted by the program. That is a sure marker of subpar service, the likes of which Hannibal will take note of and remember for the future. This store-owner may yet continue to provide him with sustenance. Though the quality of the video is poor, it is easy to make out the portentous expressions of journalists poised in front of police tape cordoning off the riverbank. Staticky images are then revealed of the corpses. Their pale complexions are only offset by the chasms of blood and other corporeal and non-corporeal viscera revealed through the openings in the torsos. 

Hannibal peruses a newspaper that broadcasts a similar headline as the footage. 

“‘ _Il Mostro_ strikes again,’” Will reads and scoffs.

Hannibal shares a similar sentiment, though he disguises it with bewilderment. “ _La polizia_ did not give me the impression that this was _Il Mostro’s_ work last night. Perhaps they have come across some new information.” Obviously, they have not. 

“ _Signore_ Pazzi made it pretty clear to me last night that he thinks this is _Il Mostro_ ,” Will says over his sandwich.

 _Poor, misguided Commendatore_. 

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. That might be a part of all this” —Will gestures to the titillated shoppers and erratic news— “but I suspect there’s also another reason. The _Commendatore’s_ being very obvious about this, more than any other reports of _Il Mostro’s_ kills. Especially considering the pandemonium he could stir up. He’s taking a gamble. Either the Inspector solves this kill and finally gets _Il Mostro,_ or he uses it as bait for the real thing.”

Now _that_ is curious. Hannibal finds himself more amused and displeased by _Commendatore_ Pazzi. “So he might not believe this is _Il Mostro_ after all.”

Will’s no longer watching the television screen. “I told him… that I don’t believe this is _Il Mostro_.”

“And why,” asks Hannibal, “is that?”

Will finishes tearing at his sandwich and licks the crumbs from the damp tip of his thumb. He’s perfectly calm when all around him sheep mewl with excitement, horror, and utter misunderstanding, looking for a wolf when really they should be turning towards the staff and shears of their shepherd. 

“This killer’s agenda is merciful, even if his means are destructive,” Will analyzes, his eyes clear even if they are still ringed with sleepless shadows. “He gives his victims passage over the river that they can’t afford when they’re alive.”

“The sand dollars,” Hannibal concurs. “Currency.”

“Yes. They need it for security, entrance to the other side.”

Hannibal tilts his head, still hearing the horrified, stoic, and bland pronouncements of murder from the television and crowd. “There is also religious symbolism tied to the sand dollar. The five wounds of crucifixion and resurrection. The sand dollar is synonymous with rebirth.”

“The mythology here is more pagan, even heretical, than sacred,” Will argues. “This killer is going for transformation, but bestial transformation. He surrounded the bodies with empty shells, food and treasures for his passengers. He put them in an aquatic environment, not a heavenly one.” Will leers. “Popular myth also puts sand dollars down as the lost coinage of mermaids and Atlantians.”

Will’s empathy is truly astounding. What ferry would be necessary for Will to travel to Hannibal’s shores? There can be no Charon to take him; Will, after all, is a sailor charting his own course. Hannibal is excited to see what souls he might untether from their mortal flesh to form bright, glorious, and tortured constellations, like the Ancient Greeks and Romans believed, to guide Will’s journeys onward. 

“So this killer must change his victims,” Hannibal proposes, “because, even with the price they pay, they’ll be denied access on account of their incomplete forms.”

“Yes,” says Will energetically. Hannibal is curious about whether his impassioned response is due to the topic of their conversation or his partner.

“And you don’t think _Il Mostro_ is the same, Will?”

Will laughs so savagely some of the other customers jump and stare at him. Will, noticing this, tempers himself. Somewhat. His tone is still more furious, more tantalizingly smoldering than it had been when he was discussing the other killer.

“If _Il Mostro_ had done this,” Will growls, “he would have jammed the points of the shells down into the victims’ retinas while they were still alive. Like medieval prisoners who are blinded by kings before they’re tossed into their cells for all of dark eternity.”

Will drives his fork through a leaf of lettuce. Transparent juices slide down the tines. The younger man doesn’t break eye contact, not even glancing at his sharp utensil, leaving Hannibal to wonder whether he’s even aware of his action, or if Will’s subconsciously executing his violence, like he did onto his glass at the Forte. Both prospects are equally enticing. 

“They’d be living, too, when _Il Mostro_ cut their lungs out,” Will goes on, saying almost glibly, “I think he’d be interested in the experience. What would these creatures look like, their respiratory organs removed from their empty rib cages and then filled with sand?”

Hannibal has to agree: having two flailing pigs, clawing at their opening chests and then wriggling under the crushing weight of mounds of grit and dust, is a very intriguing prospect. Which would end the last, dying vestiges of their graceless twitching sooner? The lack of oxygen, endless bleeding out or spine-snapping pressure? Maybe their blood would paint the sand a beautiful red, like powdered pigments for paint.

“Unlike this killer,” Will says, “he wouldn’t care about transporting his passengers safely to another shore. No, he’d flood the gondola and its contents. He wouldn’t stop, not until they sunk down into the ocean’s scummy bottom.”

Hannibal feels like he’s been cast back weeks and weeks ago, and he’s being _seen_ by Will in the Uffizi gallery again. It’s uncannily like the power and revelation of Will’s first transgression. Hannibal experiences him searching with the same penetration now, but the novel specificity of his grotesque and lovely insights make the doctor’s nerves sing. 

Nevertheless, he merely sips on his espresso. “You’ve thought about this a lot.”

Something changes in Will’s eyes, only a flicker of light and dark. The nature of the storm has shifted. Something else moves in the depths of the water. No, it’s always been moving there, even if mist had concealed it before. It’s something overwhelming. A leviathan. A man-eating sea-beast.

Then, Hannibal realizes. 

Will’s nightmares, the scenes that bathed him in sweat and tore him from peaceful slumber, weren’t centered on the crime scene as he witnessed it in person, in his waking memories. 

“This is what you were dreaming about last night,” Hannibal concludes. “What _Il Mostro_ would have done to the bodies. Not the other killer.”

Will chews on his lower lip and turns his cup like a dial for some sign of his direction. When the handle fails to provide a recourse, he loses himself in the dark liquid instead. Hannibal wonders how Will’s eyes must look to his reflection. “Yes,” he says in a low, angry, helplessly engrossed voice.

Hannibal knew Will’s fixations on his Florentine persona were... dangerous. 

He didn’t know just what kind of seductive, exquisite, and vital danger they might be. 

He twirls a slice of meat around the tines of his fork, wishing he were tasting Will’s flesh instead, in each and every way a man can taste it. Hannibal wants to devour him, inside and out, in the throes of pleasure and pain. 

He realizes he was doing the same last night. As Hannibal kissed and caressed the younger man’s skin, physically infiltrating Will in his waking moments, so too did he invade Will’s subconscious thoughts, stroking, grasping, and molding the supple, splendid matter of his dreams. He had felt his body and mind. He had consumed him entirely.

“Has it allowed you to see him more clearly?” Hannibal asks.

“I might be able to see him,” Will says with unconcealed frustration, glaring at Hannibal. How rude. How delightful. How _clever_. “But there’s no predictable pattern to his work. He’s killed across all creeds, colors, men and women. It’s not clear how exactly he chooses his victims, or what his motives are behind killing in the first place. The only consistent factors are the unprecedented levels of domination he lords over his victims, and the aims of his alterations.”

“And what are those aims?”

“Shaming, but not for the sake of the public,” says Will. “For the sake of art. _Il Mostro_ instills the rapture of fear and appreciation, the height of sensation, in what would otherwise be the tasteless and banal.”

“Why waste it,” Hannibal muses, “when you can elevate it?”

“Exactly.” 

Hannibal cleans the edge of his plate with his napkin, absorbing the pomegranate juices. “Never have I heard the media, even _la polizia_ analyze _Il Mostro_ in this way.” 

For Hannibal, the buzz of news and gossip all around him and Will resembles murmuring locusts, forecasting nothing: not salvation, nor attainment, just plague and ineluctable death. Widespread devouring until nothing is left.

With all of Will’s incredible insights, what unbearable noise does he hear, Hannibal wonders? Hannibal wants to raise the irritating pitch if only to provoke Will toward stomping down every insect.

“No kidding,” Will scowls. “Most people don’t like thinking hard about art or death. It’s like any museum-goer. Thirty-seconds or less.”

“And most are incapable of conceiving of bringing art and death together,” Hannibal remarks. “But you see them in conjunction. You are exemplary, dear Will.”

“Didn’t know exemplary meant struggling with night terrors and imagining all the ways to butcher those around me.” He glowers at Hannibal.

Hannibal reads Will’s stern countenance as an indictment of the pains _Il Mostro_ , and therefore allegedly Hannibal, has put him through. Hannibal could counter with the bath and massage, but he doesn’t want to make it too easy for Will. After all, how better can Hannibal witness Will’s empathy and his nature in all their deviations and divinations than with the illumination of pain as well as pleasure?

“That is understandable,” Hannibal says instead. “Even though you see beyond the surface of conventional values and status quos, you still fear the associations your mind makes. The contents of your thoughts and your dreams and that which they do to those things you love. But you mustn’t forget. Fear is not so different from knowledge. It is only knowing at an earlier stage. Its incomplete form.”

“Chloris,” says Will. “Flora.”

“Yes. _Primavera_.” 

Though they are seated in the clamor of the shop, Hannibal thinks he and Will have both been transported to the room that they share in the Uffizi. They look at each other with the same clarity, details sharpened by reminiscence and new time. 

Hannibal smiles. “‘ _Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza fesse creando, e a la sua bontate più conformato, e quel ch’e’ più apprezza, fu de la volontà la libertate; che le creature intelligenti, e tutte e sole, fuoro e son dotate.’_ It’s Dante’s canto about paradise. Translated roughly, it describes how the greatest gift God bestowed on his creation was freedom of will. Will. It was granted onto creatures of intelligence, and no others endowed.”

“I might not know much Italian, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the way ‘will’ is supposed to be translated,” says Will dryly.

“I see striking similarities. What is most valuable among mankind, the marker of the highest intelligence and true knowledge, is Will.”

“You might have gotten away with that in the bathtub, Hannibal, but there’s no way you’re convincing me right now that I’m the stuff of paradise.”

“Why not?” asks Hannibal. “Is it because you believe the darkness you experience in this world could be no place of paradise?”

“Maybe,” says Will, scratching his head. He glances away, saying, “maybe… it’s that I don’t belong in paradise. I’m not supposed to be up there. Where I’m supposed to be is down here, with all this dark”— Will gestures to the television set rife with bloody, mangled images, sensationalist stories, empty babble— “and every damned shade—” Will’s hard eyes are on the crowd now, tittering, oblivious, inferior.

But his tone changes to a different kind of desperation as his gaze ignites like a flash of lightning on the maelstrom, like the deep fires of the inferno. His mouth falls wide as he almost gasps it, and he’s looking nowhere else, his attention entirely devoted to the man across from him— to Hannibal— as he proclaims, “And maybe I’m supposed to be down here with—”

Will just stops himself. He clamps his lips shut. But his gaze is too riveted, his jaw clenched too tight, that the name might go unsaid… but its subject has certainly been addressed. 

“Is that right?” Hannibal responds.

Hannibal can see himself very clearly taking Will back to his apartment and, per Will’s suggestion, returning them to the bathtub. He doesn’t think their experience would be as soothingly exploratory as it was earlier that afternoon, however. He imagines when they’d have gotten into the bathroom, they would have already stripped each other and tossed their clothes throughout the apartment, kissing each other blindly, groping each other raw, before they proceeded to take each other in any and every way they possibly could. 

“The day is still young,” Hannibal says instead. “Where to?”

Will grabs the newspaper and unfolds the photo on the front. “Know any good places on the Arno?”

Hannibal smiles. “Ponte Vecchio provides a very good view of the river. It is also close to one of my favorite grocers.”

The old bridge is flooded with tourists and locals, even though the riverbank has been choked off with striped ribbons. 

“I’m surprised they haven’t sealed this place, too,” says Will. From the open arches in the sturdy bridge, Hannibal and Will watch officers and their vehicles guard the sides of the road against intruders and wade carefully into the currents with their instruments.

Hannibal gestures to the goldsmiths and boutique window-fronts. “We are among the palaces built over six hundred years ago by the merchant princes, the king-makers, and the connivers of Renaissance Florence. The city used to thrive on a prosperous banking and mercantile economy.”

Will glares at the shops and passers-by, none of whom attend the police presence stationed at every juncture of the river. “Now, it depends on tourism,” he says acidly. “Close the Ponte Vecchio a day, and its shop keepers will revolt. As connivers of modern Florence.”

“Indeed. Though I imagine those who depend on the Arno for a livelihood are still suffering.”

At one point of the riverbank very close to the base of the Ponte Vecchio, a group of sailors and boatmen have congregated, thronging the officers and trying to trespass their ropes. Hannibal watches the police resist their assailants, first with attempts at calm diffusion and then with increasing volume and force. 

“It’s one of those good, hardworking fellas who probably killed that couple,” Will observes. “He’d have working knowledge of the docks to store the bodies, and he’ll also know the flow of the river. The police are focusing on _Il Mostro_ , either as the killer or their baited target, when they should be looking at gondoliers.”

“You’re sure it’s a gondolier and not just any boatman?”

“What’s important to him isn’t just the water. It’s unity, joining the experience of his passengers with their final incarnations."

“Then perhaps that should be our next stop. A ride on a _barchetto_ , with music and _prosecco_.”

“…How romantic.” 

The clamor of the confrontation at the riverside appears to have drawn more attention from the Ponte Vecchio’s shoppers, who scurry over to the archways, gazing down and pushing at each other above as gondoliers and officers yell and grab at each other below. The sharpening swirl of sirens cuts through the upheaval, police cars peeling up the roads to offer assistance. 

The stampede of pigs does the irksome job of separating Will from Hannibal, but not without providing other diversions.

“ _Buon pomeriggio_.”

“ _Buon pomeriggio_ ,” greets the other man haltingly back to Hannibal. His lean body is caught between other shoppers, and he hungrily bends forward, trying to obtain a clearer view of the river.

“That is a beautiful pendant,” Hannibal remarks, indicating his neck. “Did you buy it from the shops here?” 

The other man shakes his gaunt head. “No. It’s special.”

“It is very unique.”

Twisted silver hangs over the other man’s chest, depicting a figure with a long, curling beard, his torso bare and the lower half of his body unwinding as an elegant fin. With a muscled arm, he raises his trident and shining sea lions converge around him. 

It looks almost exactly like the drawing Hannibal had done last night after his interview while he waited for Will. The corpses had inspired him. Their naively cradled forms, adorned with shells and sandy pelts like sea lions, evoked the images of another myth:

“Proteus,” says Hannibal. “God of the seas and rivers. One might argue he was most famous for his unparalleled powers of transformation. Like the sea, he was made from the original matter of the universe, which he bent into any shape, any beast, according to his needs.”

“Yes,” the other man says, his wide eyes unblinking, cheeks sallow. 

“You are a gondolier?” Hannibal asks without uncertainty.

The other man looks surprised. Though his oversized jacket covers much of his attire, just as this man intended, Hannibal recognizes the sliver of a dark collar distinctive for one of Florence’s main tourism companies. While the brand includes a wide range of activities, this man’s predisposition to maritime subjects would place him as a gondolier, ferrying tourists to and fro, from the shores of life to the realm of death.

Just like Will said. 

“Have you heard about what happened to those tourists on the boat?”

The man’s face is waxen and very still, his voice barely carrying over the panicked crowd. “Yes. It’s sad.”

“Is it?” Hannibal asks. “I find there is a certain majesty in other-worldly transformation. A journey is more than the outcome. A journey is a process, a becoming, if you will. It requires being open to changing before you reach your pre-conceived destination.”

“Yes,” the other man breathes. “The water is… constantly rising. Forty years ago, it flooded over. Over a hundred people were taken away. Prematurely. So much death and destruction. They were… unprepared. They should have been ready.”

“But not to hold back the water,” says Hannibal.

“No,” the other man gasps. “Water is beautiful.”

“It’s life,” says Hannibal. “And it’s death. It gives life as easily as it takes it away.”

It is very easy to get this man to drink the addictive concoction Hannibal’s language brews, having been parched of sustenance for his true nature for so long. Hannibal does not mind administering the potion, though he wonders how his patient will take it: as salve or as toxin. Or when both effects will kick in, with what trigger.

“It is everything,” the man says with complete conviction. “They weren’t ready for it. They needed to be changed.”

“As one so often must be,” Hannibal agrees. “And now, they finally are.”

“Yes.”

“ _Ciao, signore_.”

The other man stares at Hannibal, nods and dissolves like sea foam against the turbulent waves.

Certain myths place merfolk as either benevolent saviors of the lost and shipwrecked who return them to the shores, or as sirens who drag their prey to their deaths down below. Were Hannibal to give _Commendatore_ Pazzi, and more importantly Will, a vision of their true sea man, the shy creature swimming just below the surface, what would it prognosticate?

Prosperity or ruin? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the murders begin. It wouldn't be Hannibal without symbolic kills that tell us more about Will and Hannibal's relationship, and compel Will to make some revelations and choices, as well as Hannibal...
> 
> Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

**Author's Note:**

> So, a little bit of a prologue this time. 
> 
> The true meeting between Will and Hannibal will come up shortly!


End file.
